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THE MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 



THE MORAL BASIS OF 
DEMOCRACY 



SUNDAY MORNING TALKS TO 
STUDENTS AND GRADUATES 



BY 

ARTHUR TWINING HADLEY 

PRESIDENT or YALE UNIVERSITY 




NEW HAVEN 

YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS 

LONDON • HUMPHREY MILFORD • OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS 

MDCCCCXIX 






COPYRIGHT^ 1919j BY 
YALE UNIVERSITY PRESS. 



M -2 1920 



CC)CI.A5Gl:>74 



--Wo I 



Two years ago this place was filled with men in 
uniform, eager in their enthusiasm for the work 
that was before them, A year ago they had left us; 
and among those who remained the spirit of en- 
thusiasm had given place to one of solemn resolu- 
tion. Today those who went out have returned in 
triumph to lay aside their uniforms and to resume 
the work of peace. The spirit of the day is one of 
rejoicing. 

But not all of those who went have come back. 
Two hundred Tale men have given their lives in 
their country ^s service. Some had the joy and the 
glory of being killed in action. The runner hasf 
ended his last race on the fields of France. The 
oarsman has fought his best contest to a finish in 
the waves of the English Channel. The scholar has 
in a single immortal day set forth more of the true 
meaning of what Yale had to teach than others, 
less privileged, have done in a lifetime. And side 
by side with those who have thus borne public testi- 
mony of their devotion, there is a larger number 
called to bear the yet heavier burden of lingering 
death from wounds or from disease. Theirs has 
been the greater sacrifice, with the lesser visible 
good; and to them belongs today the fullest measure 
of recognition. 



vi FOREWORD 

These men have fought their fight; ours remains 
before us. Fifty years ago Abraham Lincoln 
pointed out the way — the only way — in which the 
living can worthily commemorate the dead. It is 
for us to see that these heroic dead shall not have 
died in vain. The visible memorials which we may 
erect, whatever their usefulness or their beauty, 
are but symbols of our gratitude and affection. 
The gratitude and the affection themselves are 
manifested in seeing that the work of the dead is 
not left half done. 

The need of this admonition is even greater today 
than it was when Lincoln spoke; for the dangers to 
freedom are more immediate and more complex 
today than they were fifty years ago. At the close 
of our Civil War we faced the comparatively simple 
problem of preserving freedom for men already 
trained in the principles of law and morals on 
which free institutions had been based. Today we 
have to secure freedom to men of many races, with 
many standards of law and morals, more accus- 
tomed to despotic authority than to the exercise of 
self -government. Liberty is threatened from below 
as well as from above. Those who died have pro- 
tected democracy against the attacks of those who 
conceived themselves to be above the law. To us 
remains the harder task of protecting it against the 



FOREWORD vii 

machinations of those who conceive themselves to 
be beneath it. 

It is one of history's plainest lessons that democ- 
racy is based upon self-control; that a people 
cannot remain free unless its members will volun- 
tarily use their freedom for the purposes of the 
community under a system of moral law, Yale has 
taught this lesson in the past. May she continue 
to do so in the future; and may we, as Yale men, 
take our part in the teaching! Thus shall we ren- 
der to the dead the highest honor that is in our 
power, by keeping our hand day and night upon 
the maintenance of the work to which they have 
given their lives. 

Commemoration Service 

June 15, 1919. 



CONTENTS 



ETHICS OF CITIZENSHIP p,_^ 

The Word of the Lord's Patience . . 1 

Animosity : Its Causes and Its Cure . . 13 

Belief in Men 25 

The Honor of the Service ... 37 

A Citizen of Zion ..... 48 

The Duty of Straightforwardness . . 56 

The Duty of Independent Thinking . . 68 

The Union of Faith and Intelligence . 78 

Conflicting Philosophies of Life . . 91 

The Unconscious and the Intangible . 105 



ETHICS OF LEADERSHIP 

The Man Who Was Prepared ... 119 

Fitness for Command .... 130 

The Price of Greatness . . . . 142 

The Christian Standard of Success . . 153 

The Personality of Jesus . . . 164 

The Good Fight of Faith ... . 175 

Self-Consecration . . , • . 185 

The Compelling Power of Ideals . . 196 



ETHICS OF CITIZENSHIP 



THE WORD OF THE LORD'S PATIENCE 

1915 

Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, slow to wrath : 
For the wrath of man worketh not the righteousness of God. 

When Mr. Great-heart, in Bunyan's Pilgrim's 
Progress, was guiding his party along the trouble- 
some road to the Celestial City, they found an old 
gentleman, obviously a pilgrim, lying asleep under 
a tree. They awoke him, in order to have the pleas- 
ure and profit of his company ; but his first impulse 
was to treat them all as enemies. When at length 
he was persuaded that they were pilgrims like him- 
self, he told them that his name was Honest and 
that he came from the town of Stupidity. *^Your 
town," said Mr. Great-heart, ^4s worse than the 
city of Destruction itself. ' ' 

^ ' Evil is wrought by want of thought, as well as 
by want of heart. ' ' This is recognized by all of us 
as a matter of worldly wisdom. We are not equally 
ready to recognize it as an integral part of Chris- 
tian teaching. We should not be surprised to find 
this reference to the town of Stupidity in the works 
of a pagan moralist or philosopher ; but most of us 
receive a distinct shock when we read it in Pilgrim's 



2 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Progress. "We are so accustomed to think of reli- 
gion as an affair of the heart that we overlook the 
fact that its application to the practical conduct of 
life requires the use of the head. We hear so much 
about the mercy which is promised to the man who 
repents that we fall into the comfortable belief 
that all Christianity requires of a man is good 
intentions. 

For this belief there is not the shadow of an 
excuse. Every page of the gospels teaches us the 
duty of intelligent conduct. The older Judaism 
followed the precepts of the law blindly. Not so 
the new message brought by Jesus. Where the 
elders would have had him leave disease uncured 
for fear of breaking the sabbath, Jesus preached 
the doctrine of rational religion by asking them, 
' ' Is it lawful to do good on the sabbath day, or to 
do evil ? ' ' This requirement of intelligent conduct 
is a fundamental and distinctive feature in Chris- 
tianity. It is this that has made it a religion for 
free men instead of for slaves, a religion for strong 
men instead of for weak ones. It is this which has 
made it last through the centuries and enabled it 
to meet the needs of varying times and various 
races. 

The duty of applying our intelligence to the 
conduct of life is not only an essential element of 



THE LORD'S PATIENCE 3 

Christian doctrine; it is an element which we are 
in constant danger of forgetting. We dwell in the 
town of Stupidity a larger part of the time than 
it is pleasant for us to admit. For this town har- 
bors two sorts of inhabitants. There is one set 
which does not think at all. There is another set 
which does a fraction of the necessary thinking, 
and mistakes it for the whole. The former class 
consists of those who take their opinions ready 
made; who sometimes perhaps have thoughts but 
never ideas; who get their views on politics from 
their party, their views on religion from their 
minister, and their views on business from their 
associates. To this class I venture to hope that few 
college graduates belong. But the errors of the 
members of the second class, who do imperfect 
and inadequate thinking on these subjects, are just 
as dangerous as those of the first class — in fact 
perhaps more dangerous, because they flatter them- 
selves that they are using judgment when they are 
using misjudgment. 

There is a terrible temptation — I speak with feel- 
ing, for it is one to which I am myself subject in 
the last degree — to make up our minds on the basis 
of half of the evidence and then say and do things 
which prevent us from ever hearing or appreciating 
the other half. We act like the judge who, having 



4 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

heard the witnesses for the complainant, refused to 
listen to those of the defendant, and could not re- 
frain from expressing his indignation that the 
defendant's counsel should try to offer any evi- 
dence at all in behalf of so bad a man as the prose- 
cution had shown his client to be. 

I do not believe that there is one of us here who 
would wittingly do an injustice to a fellow man. 
Yet day by day and hour by hour we are un- 
wittingly doing our brothers injustice by taking our 
own point of view to the exclusion of theirs. We 
condemn men whose ends are as good as our own, 
because they are trying to reach them by a route 
which is not on our map. We inflict the penalties 
of public disapproval, or the yet worse penalties 
of social ostracism, on men who ought to be our 
friends and could easily be our friends if it were 
not for the fact that we had judged them on the 
basis of some casual prejudice, or some newspaper 
story that was two-thirds untrue, before we had a 
chance to know what they really were doing. I 
hate to think how large a part of the sin and shame 
and pain of the world is of this unnecessary and 
preventable character. 

This is just the sort of thing which it is our busi- 
ness to prevent, both as students and as Christians. 
Our college course has given us an opportunity for 



THE LORD'S PATIENCE 5 

a wide outlook on life. We have been taught to 
know many kinds of men, to judge evidence de- 
liberately, to weigh the value of different sorts of 
achievement. We shall be false to our trust if we 
confine this study of men and of evidence and of 
values to our professional life, and leave it out of 
our friendship and our politics and our religion. 
The more our college life means to us, the greater 
is our duty to judge of men and their conduct de- 
liberately and wisely, even as Jesus himself judged 
of the conduct of those about him. 

How can we go to work to do this? Our text 
gives us three practical directions, which have 
proved valuable lessons to me each day of my life, 
though I am far from having learned them yet. 
**Let every man be swift to hear, slow to speak, 
slow to wrath. ' ' 

Swift to hear. Half of our trouble lies in the 
fact that our ears are not attuned to the language in 
which other people naturally express themselves. 
They are like a wireless apparatus arranged to 
catch the utterances of instruments that have come 
out of the same factory, but making nothing of 
other sound waves which are equally significant. 
It is a large element in practical Christianity to 
get a habit of listening for the things that other 
people want to say, rather than for things we our- 



6 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

selves want to hear. Saul of Tarsus started as 
a Pharisee — high-minded and conscientious, but 
listening only to the voice of his associates. Paul 
the apostle to the Gentiles had become all things 
to all men if by such means he might save any. He 
could help more kinds of men than any other 
apostle and lay a broader foundation for the mod- 
em church because he was able to understand the 
imperfect utterances of more kinds of men. This 
is the very crown of Christian charity : to have ears 
and eyes and heart open to other people's points of 
view and forms of expression. 

So much for the first practical direction. And 
the second is, that we should be slow to speak. We 
should not shape or proclaim our judgment until 
we have matured it. The instant that a man has 
stated his position he has made it hard to give fair 
consideration to new evidence. If he has expressed 
his opinion publicly, any change of mind will lay 
him open to the charge of inconsistency. Even if 
he has merely formulated it to himself, the prema- 
ture putting of a judgment into words tends to 
prejudge the case under question. ''The word 
that has once gone forth," says the law of the 
jungle, ''changes all trails." 

It sometimes happens that we have to act on in- 
complete evidence; that we are compelled to take 



THE LORD'S PATIENCE 7 

a position before we have found out all the facts 
that we should like to know. In a case of this kind 
it is a matter of exceptional importance that we 
should keep our heads clear, should understand that 
our reasons for what we are doing may prove 
wrong, and should hold our eyes open for new 
evidence. This is a hard task, and it is one which 
many of us fail to accomplish. The fact that we 
are not quite sure of our ground often leads us to 
state our reasons with more definiteness than the 
situation warrants ; just as a minister whom I knew 
in my boyhood always preached loudest when he 
was a little uncertain about the logic of his dis- 
course. The man who acts in this way is in per- 
petual danger of justifying himself at the expense 
of justice to others ; of blinding himself at the time 
when he most needs to keep his vision clear; of 
letting speech take the place of thought, until both 
speech and thought go hopelessly wrong. 

Again, we must be slow to wrath. Even when 
we have heard all the evidence we can get, and 
when the case appears sufficiently clear to state our 
position, we must take pains not to let our judg- 
ment be clouded by our emotion. To a religious 
man who has a real zeal for God and for truth, and 
who is impatient of anything that appears to stand 
in its way, this is the hardest lesson of all. ' ' Virtue 



8 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

is more dangerous than vice/' says a French philos- 
opher, ''because its excesses are not subject to the 
restraints of conscience." We are prone to mis- 
take intensity of feeling for intensity of power ; to 
believe that by giving way to our anger in a 
righteous cause we promote the triumph of the 
cause itself. But with weak human nature as it 
is, the red mist of anger obscures the issues, and 
instead of giving force to our blows renders us 
incapable of giving them direction. ''Out of my 
path!" said Charles the Bold to Crevecoeur: "the 
wrath of kings is like the wrath of heaven." But 
his undaunted vassal replied, ' ' Only when, like the 
wrath of heaven, it is just." 

The need of weighing our words and controlling 
our feelings is particularly great in a common- 
wealth like ours, where we act not as individuals 
but as members of a body politic. Every free com- 
munity, whether school or college, city or state, is 
governed by public opinion, and this opinion is the 
result of discussion. If the members of such a 
community make up their minds deliberately and 
carefully, this kind of government is the best in the 
world. If they make up their minds hastily or 
passionately, it is the worst in the world. For the 
ill-considered speech of one member of such a com- 
munity may rouse aU his fellows to unjust preju- 



THE LORD'S PATIENCE 9 

dice and intemperate action. One man states a 
hasty conclusion as if it were a fact. A second man 
accepts it as a fact, and makes it the ground for 
passionate expressions of hate or resentment. Still 
other men, who have not looked into the facts at 
all, are caught in this common flame of resentment 
and hurried into precipitate action which does 
harm to themselves and injustice to others. This 
is one of the most serious dangers which America 
has to face at the present day ; and the resistance 
to this danger is one of the greatest public services 
which the men of the country can render. It is easy 
to repeat things that other people are saying and 
to fall in with public prejudices and mis judgment. 
It is hard to look facts fairly in the face and to 
demand that other people should do the same 
thing. But the man who can accomplish this is the 
real leader. He may be unpopular for the moment, 
but in the long run he is trusted. It is this readi- 
ness to see facts and power to make others see them 
that distinguish the statesman from the politician. 
*^Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall 
make you free." This is the only kind of freedom 
really worth having. A man may enjoy all the 
social and political liberty in the world, and yet be 
helplessly bound as a slave to prejudice or to 
passion. The glorious liberty of the gospel belongs 



10 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

to him who has prepared himself to face facts as 
they are; who knows men, weighs evidence, and 
holds his high purposes unclouded. And to him 
belongs a reward greater than wealth or office: 
the increased assurance of his power to face what- 
ever he may be called upon to meet. '^Because 
thou hast kept the word of my patience,'' said the 
Lord, ''I also will keep thee from the hour of 
temptation. ' ' 

There has never been a time when our country 
had more need of this kind of freedom than it has 
today. 

^ In the last few years we have witnessed a great 
extension of the power of the people. Democracy 
is a very different thing now from what it was 
twenty years ago. The public demands govern- 
ment action on a great many matters which pre- 
vious generations left individuals to settle for 
themselves. The motives for demanding govern- 
ment action are generally good ; but the results are 
often bad. ' ' The new democracy, ' ' said an English 
statesman who had himself done much in the direc- 
tion of humane and intelligent protection of the 
rights of the weak, ^ ^ is passionately benevolent and 
passionately fond of power." It is just this emo- 
tional attitude of passion that creates the chief 
danger to American politics today. Men have a 



THE LORD'S PATIENCE 11 

zeal for God, but not according to knowledge. 
They mistake prejudice for fact, and think that 
good intentions can take the place of careful 
examination of evidence. 

No government which manages its affairs on the 
basis of prejudice rather than evidence can long 
endure. Many foreign critics regard our present 
experience as presaging the downfall of democracy. 
I believe that these critics are wrong in their pre- 
dictions. But in their analysis of the dangers they 
are pretty nearly right; and in order to falsify 
their predictions we must take heed to the dangers 
themselves. "We must help the community to 
examine evidence and exercise self-control ; and the 
best way that we can do this for many years to 
come is by ourselves setting the example of self- 
control. 

And, great as is this national need of self-control, 
there is at the present moment an international 
need which almost overshadows it. The nations of 
Europe are engaged in a war which for the time 
being makes it almost impossible for most of their 
members to be either swift to hear or slow to speak. 
Any one who has really lived through the experi- 
ences of a great war knows how impossible it is to 
secure clearness of judgment or restraint of utter- 
ance after the war has actually begun. All the 



12 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

more necessary is it, then, that we who are still at 
peace should avoid harsh judgment, hasty generali- 
zation, or ill-timed expressions of public feeling. 
[t is not the advocates of a large army and navy 
who constitute the menace to our peace. It is not 
the advocates of a more vigorous foreign policy. 
It is those who indulge in the luxury of righteous 
indignation without full information as to the facts 
or adequate calculation of consequences. Of all 
the Christian virtues, intelligent self-control — 
temperance in the broad and ancient sense — is the 
one which America most needs in the conduct of 
its affairs. 



ANIMOSITY: ITS CAUSES AND ITS CURE 

1914 

Let us therefore follow after the things which make for 
peace. 

To make our prayer for peace more than a mere 
ceremony three things are necessary — ^sincere de- 
sire, intelligent thought, and unselfish readiness to 
take our own share in the work to be done. 

The first of these things — sincere desire for 
peace — we all have. Whatever may be our several 
opinions as to the right and wrong of the contest 
now raging, we unite in the wish that it may come 
to an end as speedily as possible. War is a terrible 
and a hateful thing. We hate it for the wounds 
and the sickness it brings to those who fight. We 
hate it for the yet greater pain which it brings to 
those whose homes are broken up by the death of 
men and the untold misery of women and children. 
We hate it because it turns gentle and courteous 
nations back into savagery. We hate it most of all 
for the violence which it does to our ideals of 
humanity and Christian duty. 

We had fondly hoped that the era of wars be- 
tween civilized nations was past, and that hand in 



14 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

hand with the material progress of the nineteenth 
century there had been a corresponding spiritual 
progress toward the realization of Christian ideals 
of peace. All this hope is suddenly blasted. The 
most enlightened nations of the earth are caught 
in the same passion of war as the veriest savages — 
less indiscriminately cruel, but just as blind in 
their frenzy of patriotic love and hate. 

"With our illusions shattered and our very ideals 
shaken, we crave helplessly for peace; and as far 
as the mere craving goes, we are ready to pray 
for it. 

But how little this mere craving amounts to! 
What effect will it have on Englishman or German, 
Frenchman or Russian, each desperately convinced 
of the righteousness of his own cause, for which he 
has already suffered and is prepared to die if need 
be, that prayers for peace are offered by members 
of other nations, comfortably distant from the fray 
and from the passions that evoked it? No direct 
effect whatever. It is wrong to dignify this profit- 
less expression of desire by the name of prayer. 
Unless we follow up our prayers by intelligent help 
in promoting peace on earth they are but the 'Wain 
repetitions" of the heathen. They may have a 
certain use as a public recognition of the controlling 
power of God over the affairs of men; otherwise 



ANIMOSITY 15 

they are no better than the peace parades and the 
children's peace cards, and other similar manifes- 
tations of misdirected zeal with which we are now 
familiar. People think they are doing their duty, 
when they are simply indulging the luxury of ex- 
pressing their own emotions in public. To expect 
such prayer to be answered is folly on the part of 
the ignorant, and blasphemy on the part of those 
who should be wiser. 

No; the mere expression of our wishes, however 
fervent and often repeated, will not stop this war 
or prevent another. To pray effectually we must 
take thought. We must find what were the causes 
at work in men's minds which led them to forget 
themselves in their zeal for fighting. "When we 
know how the trouble arose we can know how to 
make our thoughts and sentiments effective to pre- 
vent its recurrence, and can rely on God's help in 
so doing. We may not be able to stop this war, but 
we can bear an honorable part in preventing the 
next one. 

To any one who looks at the present European 
crisis dispassionately, the striking thing — I may 
well say, the pathetic thing — is the failure of the 
different nations to understand anything about one 
another's point of view. Each is so fervently con- 
vinced that it is right that it credits its enemies 



16 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCEACY 

with being hopelessly and wilfully wrong — either 
deceived by their rulers or animated by the lust 
of conquest. It believes all good of itself and all 
evil of its neighbors. It can no more see the truth 
in international affairs than an individual man can 
see the truth of a private controversy in the midst 
of blind rage of passion. Under the impulse of 
such emotions each people does deeds of good and 
evil, of devoted self-sacrifice and mad destruction, 
of which in times of peace it would be incapable. 
This is what makes war; the outward acts of 
violence are but the symptoms of the nation's 
mental state. 

Now this blind ' * animosity, ' ' if I may use a word 
whose derivation gives a subtle clue to its meaning, 
is not a thing of sudden growth. The mind of 
England and the mind of Germany have been 
slowly working apart for a whole generation. Mis- 
understandings, slight in themselves, give rise to 
suspicion. Suspicion breeds further misunder- 
standing. Each year as it has passed has found 
the two nations less able to appreciate one another's 
needs and aspirations. "What to one people appears 
an act of self-preservation appears to the other a 
wilful measure of hostility directed against itself. 
The public press voices this hostility. Unscrupulous 
politicians use it for their own purposes. Gradu- 



ANIMOSITY 17 

ally the emotions are so aroused on either side that 
when some crisis arises in international politics 
neither side can reason with the other, because 
neither can see facts as the other sees them. 

But this want of mutual understanding, bad as 
it is, would hardly be sufficient to cause a war. The 
evils of modern warfare are so colossal, and the 
results to be gained so uncertain, that no mere 
intellectual differences would bring peoples to the 
fighting point. But it too often happens that want 
of understanding is aggravated by want of cour- 
tesy; that difference of opinion is made intolerable 
by bad manners. One nation may think that it 
owns the sea, and another may believe that it can 
beat everything on land ; but as long as the respec- 
tive nations keep these opinions to themselves they 
do comparatively little harm. The danger comes 
when these views are obtruded on others. It comes 
from boastfulness and arrogance, and half truths 
uttered as if they were the whole truth. Out of this 
grow the differences of thought and feeling which 
make men ready to kill each other. 

The effective way to stop war is to stop these 
misunderstandings and discourtesies in their in- 
ception. A situation like the one which I have 
described can seldom be cured, but it can often be 
prevented. In fact, a large part of the work of 



18 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

diplomacy is concerned with the prevention of just 
this kind of misunderstanding. Each nation has 
trained representatives at the capitals of the others, 
to see how people feel, to inform the home govern- 
ment what has caused offence or what may con- 
ciliate, and to explain to the foreign government the 
real meaning of transactions harmless in their 
intent but liable to be misunderstood. Few of us 
realize how much both the diplomats and the gov- 
ernments are engaged in this work of pacifying 
emotions before they have reached an intractable or 
incurable stage. 

And not only sovereigns or diplomats, but a large 
part of the organized agencies of civilization itself 
are occupied with the prevention of these misunder- 
standings. Courts of arbitration like the Hague 
tribunal ; the whole set of usages and customs which 
we call by the name of international law; the yet 
wider form of comity which has been introduced by 
international trade and international credit; the 
interchange of ideas which goes with modern 
travel — all these are means to bring the peoples 
into closer contact and better harmony. The whole 
ordered system of life which we call by the name 
of civilized society is so dependent on peace for its 
maintenance, and so shaken by war or by the threat 
of war, that it puts into operation whatever ma- 



ANIMOSITY 19 

chinery it can command, in order to prevent out- 
bursts of feeling like the one which has today- 
overwhelmed Europe. 

But all machinery fails, and all machinery must 
fail. The question of peace or war rests not with 
the diplomats, but with the people. To bring about 
peace on earth men must develop the Christian vir- 
tues of fairness and courtesy. They must try to 
see things as others see them ; to speak and act with 
a view to the feelings of others as well as them- 
selves. This appreciation of others' point of view 
is the essential element both in fairness and in 
courtesy. They are not really different things; 
they are different sides of the same thing. Fairness 
is consideration for others as shown on the intel- 
lectual or subjective side. Courtesy is considera- 
tion for others as shown on the social and practical 
side. 

I spoke of them a moment ago as distinctively 
Christian virtues. You will perhaps be surprised 
at this; for we can all remember instances among 
non-Christian peoples of singularly fair men and 
singularly courteous ones. But in spite of these 
many instances, I think it is true that Christianity 
was the first religion to insist on the application of 
these standards to all mankind ; to demand fairness 
or objectivity of judgment by all and courteous 



20 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

consideration for all — low as well as high, people 
as well as kings. 

If we look in the works of the ancient moralists 
we shall be struck by the fact that the knowledge 
necessary to virtuous conduct is assumed to be the 
property of the few. These few must learn to 
judge things rightly, to form their opinion dis- 
passionately, to provide for farsighted manage- 
ment of the community. The great body of the 
people are not to do thinking for themselves, but 
to take the standards set by others ; to accept their 
opinions and lines of conduct ready made. Against 
this monopoly of moral intelligence Jesus Christ 
speaks out with all his voice. *'Ye shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free." It is 
not enough for the multitude to follow popular 
tradition and popular prejudice. Each man has 
the responsibility of judging for himself. It was 
for this teaching that the priests had him crucified ; 
it is this same teaching that has made him the 
prophet of modern democracy. 

And if we look at the courtesy of ancient times, 
we find that it meant courtesy to men of your own 
class. Of the duty of courtesy to other classes we 
hear comparatively little. While there were many 
individual acts of kindness to dependents and to 
slaves, dependents and slaves were regarded in the 



ANIMOSITY 21 

same general light as horses or cattle. Thou shall 
love thy neighbor and hate thine enemy, said the 
old moral code. It was left for Jesus Christ to ask, 
Who is thy neighbor, and who is thine enemy? 
With men and women of every walk in life he ex- 
changed courtesies on the basis of human equality 
and human brotherhood. If we read the gospel 
carefully we shall find that this was another reason 
why they crucified Jesus ; and it is another reason 
also why he is the prophet of modern democracy 
in its best meaning. 

He is a prophet whose message is overwhelm- 
ingly needed in this age, when the people guide the 
policy of their rulers and when the question of 
peace depends on the people's fairness and cour- 
tesy. A prayer for peace is a prayer for these 
virtues. If our own prayer for peace is to be 
sincere and effective it must be accompanied by 
daily and hourly effort on our own part to develop 
these qualities in ourselves and exercise them in our 
daily life. If we have them we are contributing to 
peace on earth, and our prayers will mean some- 
thing. If we have them not we are retarding peace 
on earth, and our prayers are mere hypocrisy. 
Any government which, while professing to seek 
peace, gives an example of arrogance to its neigh- 
bors; any newspaper which, proclaiming the evils 



22 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

of war and the desirableness of stopping it, repeats 
mean insinuations against its opponents and shapes 
its editorials to suit its own prepossessions, without 
regard to the facts ; any individual who, condemn- 
ing militarism among nations, nevertheless nurses 
his own prejudices and harbors unjust suspicions 
against his fellow men, is today belying its prayers 
by its actions. 

This is not a time for thanking God that we are 
not as other men are. This is a time for each of 
us to exercise close self-examination. How do we 
stand these tests? Are we trying individually to 
be fair, in the controversies that actually come 
before our attention ? Do we read the newspapers 
that tell us the plain truth, or do we choose the ones 
that tell us what we wish to believe ? In the athletic 
discussions of the day do we try to get our rivaPs 
point of view, or are we content to confirm our own 
prejudices? "When somebody says that another 
college is going to play unfairly, do we say that the 
men in that other college are gentlemen like our- 
selves, and would be no more guilty of intentional 
unfairness than we are ; or do we harbor suspicion 
and possibly repeat it, until the unproved gossip 
of yesterday becomes the settled belief of tomorrow ? 
You may say that these are little things. But they 
are little things that count; little things out of 



ANIMOSITY 23 

which will grow our mental attitude to the larger 
things of business and politics. 

Do we accept the Christian obligation of courtesy 
to all mankind, or do we limit our obligation to the 
narrow circle of our own immediate friends ? This 
question means something vital, not only for our 
own development but for the history of America. 
The man who according to his opportunity is con- 
siderate of every other man or woman, independent 
of questions of social class, is making himself like 
Jesus Christ and helping to make the American 
nation a Christian nation. The man who follows 
the crowd in its thoughtless shouts and jeers is 
making himself like the worst of the Pharisees, and 
is increasing the danger of that unchristian hate 
between classes which is America's greatest menace 
today. Thoughtless rudeness from a street window 
to an honest man or woman may seem a small thing 
at the moment; but the man who countenances it 
is training himself and encouraging others toward 
social war instead of social peace. 

We call ourselves students; let us study to see 
things as they are. We call ourselves democratic; 
let us recognize the obligation of courtesy to every 
man and woman. We mean to be leaders; let us 
learn so to lead that people will work together 
instead of working apart. Let us show this in our 



24 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

conduct toward the town in which we live. Let us 
show it in our behavior toward our rivals in every 
line of collegiate activity. Let us show it, above 
all, in our honest, straightforward, whole-hearted 
pursuit of the truth. Then will our prayers for 
peace mean something; then will they be heard — 
and answered ! 



BELIEF IN MEN 

1909 

Charity suffereth long and is kind; charity envieth not; 
charity vaunteth not itself, is not puffed up, 

Doth not behave itself unseemly, seeketh not her own, is 
not easily provoked, thinketh no evil; 

Rejoiceth not in iniquity, but rejoiceth in the truth; 

Beareth all things, believeth all things, hopeth all things, 
endureth all things. 

In order to accomplish anything great, a man must 
have two sides to his goodness : a personal side and 
a social side. He must be upright himself, and he 
must believe in the good intentions and possibilities 
of others about him. 

"We recognize the first of these things. "We know 
that the leader must have principles of his own; 
that he must stand for something definite, which 
he is prepared to maintain through evil report and 
good report. We do not, I think, recognize the 
second of these things to an equal degree. We do 
not appreciate how necessary it is for a man to 
believe in those about him just as far as he can and 
cooperate with them just as fully as he can. Yet 
this also is a condition of leadership. No matter 
how high the ideals for which we stand, we cannot 
expect others to follow us unless we have confidence 



^g 



26 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

in them. We cannot expect devotion if we return 
it with distrust. We cannot expect cooperation 
unless we are prepared to give freely of our con- 
fidence. The man who lacks faith in other men 
loses his best chances to work, and gradually under- 
mines his own power and his own character. The 
man who has this faith in other men gets his work 
done and impresses his own personality and ideals 
upon his age and his nation. It was this faith in 
men which made David, with all his faults, a worthy 
forerunner of Jesus Christ. It was this faith in 
men which distinguished Isaiah from Jeremiah or 
Ezekiel, and raised him out of the ranks of the 
other prophets as distinctively the herald of the 
Christian plan of salvation. It was this faith in 
men which marked every stage of the work of 
Jesus himself. 

It is not hard to see this when we study the his- 
tory of religion. It is hard to realize its decisive 
importance in the incidents of our daily life. Yet 
it is just as essential today as it ever was. 

In the early years of the Civil War the Army of 
the Potomac had a number of officers of decided 
ability in positions of high command. Not one of 
these men was in a place of leadership at the end of 
the war. Grant and Sherman, Sheridan and 
Thomas, though not all Western men, all had their 



BELIEF IN MEN 27 

training in the armies of the West instead of in 
the Army of the Potomac. What was the reason for 
this extraordinary state of things? The main 
reason, in the opinion of those best qualified to 
judge, was that the officers of the Army of the 
Potomac did not have the habit of believing in each 
other and cooperating with each other to the extent 
that prevailed in the West. They were men of 
ability; they were anxious for the success of the 
Union cause ; but they were at least equally anxious 
that other officers should not be promoted ahead of 
them. They were far too ready to listen to sugges- 
tions of evil and intrigue. Even when they were 
too honorable to countenance such intrigues in their 
own behalf, they were not strong enough to pre- 
vent these suspicions from interfering with their 
usefulness or paralyzing their activity at critical 
moments. It was not an evil which affected one 
type of officer alone. It blasted the careers of 
the bold and the cautious, of the guilty and the 
innocent. 

These evils of military intrigue were not by any 
means wholly absent from the Western armies. 
Three at least of the four generals whom I have 
named suffered severely from such intrigues. The 
habit of backbiting with the tongue or taking up 
reproaches against one's neighbor is not confined 



28 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

to any section of the country or to any specific 
meridians of longitude. But on the whole the 
Western army leaders kept their faces far more 
steadily to the work in hand than did the Eastern 
ones. "When it came time to fight they fought. 
When it came time to push ahead they pushed 
ahead. When it seemed uncertain whether their 
colleagues were helping them or hindering them, 
they gave their colleagues the benefit of the doubt. 
There was a certain largeness of mind in men like 
Grant or Sherman which made them always prefer 
to fight the enemy instead of criticising, or even 
replying to the criticisms of, their friends. And 
this in the long run counted more than mere intel- 
lectual ability like that of McClellan, or power of 
personal leadership like that of Hooker. 

I have gone into this instance at some length 
because it illustrates a kind of danger which meets 
every professional man and business man today, 
and which is as insidious as it is universal. If I can 
today help you to feel the need of faith in men as 
a means of realizing your faith in God, I believe 
that it will do more than any other one thing to 
make your Christianity a working force in the life 
of the world. I shall therefore analyze somewhat 
closely the situation which confronts us, and show 
in detail the dangers with which it is beset. 



BELIEF IN MEN 29 

We have our life work before us — a vast field, 
with plenty for us all to do. We are working in 
cooperation with others and also in competition 
with them. It is the essence of the competitive 
system that the man who can show the most results 
to his credit shall be given the largest opportunity 
for leadership in the cooperative organization. The 
competitive system is a good one — an essentially 
Christian one. The parable of the ten talents lays 
down the theory of competition as a fundamental 
part of the Christian doctrine. But, like every 
other good thing, competition is liable to be abused. 
It is good only so long as it is open and fair. If 
it ceases to be open and fair it is not competition, 
but cheating. 

Now we, as ambitious men, are not only ready 
but anxious to go into honorable competition. We 
believe that we can do something for the world, 
and we are ready to stand by the results ; to make 
what we do the test for leadership. But while we 
are engaged in this work — whether it be in law or 
in business, in politics or in scientific discovery — 
there comes a tempter who says : You are making a 
mistake to put your attention solely upon your 
work. You will never get on in that way. You are 
intent upon doing what is to be done. This would 
be all right if all others were doing the same thing. 



30 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

But they are not. They are bending their energies 
toward getting credit for what is being done, — ^not 
only the credit that belongs to them, but the credit 
that belongs to you. Insensibly we begin to believe 
these intimations; insensibly we pay a little less 
attention to our work and a little more to keeping 
ahead of our fellows. Suspicion takes the place 
of cooperation. "We enter into a contest with those 
who ought to be our friends. Sometimes we win 
the contest, sometimes we lose it. Whether we win 
or lose, the work itself is sacrificed. We remain 
at best leaders of a cause where there is nothing 
worth leading. 

The only way to stop this evil is to resist it at 
the very outset. We must avoid the habit of listen- 
ing to such suggestions. If a man who calls himself 
a friend makes them, he is no friend. If a news- 
paper which calls itself moral makes them, it is not 
really moral. The more plausibly the suggestions 
are put, the more fatally do they tend to ULader- 
mine the largeness of faith and hope and charity 
which makes life worth living. By dwelling upon 
intimations of this kind we do an injustice to our 
neighbors, to ourselves, and to our country. 

We do an injustice to our neighbors, because nine 
such irresponsible suggestions out of ten are false. 
Even when they are not false in detail they are 



BELIEF IN MEN 31 

false in their underlying assumptions. The men 
who are going out from our schools and colleges and 
workshops are predominantly good, not predomi- 
nantly bad. 

If a man singled out some one occurrence of my 
life, came to me with a distorted account of it, and 
then said that it was typical of my whole career and 
conduct, I should order him to leave the house ; and 
so would you under similar circumstances. If we 
were equally ready to do the same thing in behalf 
of our friends when charges or insinuations are 
made behind their backs, modem society would be 
healthier and more efficient than it is at present. 
If we harbor the suggestions, as we too often do, 
we excuse ourselves by saying that we do not know 
as much about our friends' motives as we do about 
our own. This simply makes the attack more 
cowardly. It does not make the probability of its 
truth any the greater. 

By the ready acceptance of these reports we harm 
ourselves no less than our friends. We do not 
realize to what extent others judge us by our 
beliefs. But we are in fact judged in that way; 
and it is right that we should be judged in that 
way. The man who is cynical, whether about 
women, or business, or politics, is assumed — and 
in nineteen cases out of twenty, with full justice — 



32 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

to be immoral in his relations to women or business 
or politics. The man who has faith in the integrity 
of others in the face of irresponsible accusations 
is assumed — and in nineteen cases out of twenty 
justly assumed — to have the confidence in others' 
goodness because he is a good man himself. This 
is why people will follow the optimist even though 
he is sometimes wrong, and shun the pessimist even 
though he is sometimes right. '^ Truth dwells with 
him who speaketh not evil against an enemy save 
from his own knowledge/' was the praise wrung 
even from that past master of duplicity Hyder Ali 
by the Scotch physician Hartley. 

But greater perhaps than the injury either to 
our neighbors or to ourselves is the injury to society 
as a whole; — to the country, the civilization, and 
the church of which we are a part. Today as never 
before we are governed by public sentiment. The 
police regulations of business, the laws of society, 
the creeds of the church, have but a small influence 
over our action as compared with the effect of that 
indefinable thing known as public opinion, whether 
in matters of business, of politics, or of religion. 
But the public opinion of the community is after 
all little more than the habits of private opinion of 
all the individual members of that community, 
transmitted as they are by word of mouth and by 



BELIEF IN MEN 33 

the printed page. If this public opinion believes 
in men and instinctively rejects slanders about 
them, we live in an atmosphere of faith. If it 
harbors such slanders and instinctively credits 
them, we live in an atmosphere of suspicion or 
cynicism. It does not make much difference what 
is the law or what is the creed of the church, in 
comparison with the question what is the habitual 
attitude of men toward their neighbors. Not only 
the man who originates slanders, but the man who 
idly repeats them, or even lends ready credence to 
them, is poisoning the sources of public opinion. 
One of the first things that is prohibited in warfare 
as soon as nations begin to become civilized is the 
poisoning of wells. Yet we too often allow in times 
of peace the poisoning of the wells of public opinion 
by the light repetition of unfounded reproach 
against one's neighbor. 

It is this condition which creates the call for men 
of faith in the affairs of the day. The readiness to 
believe evil lies heavy on society and paralyzes it. 
It is a bar to the positive action of men who would 
make society better. The man who really com- 
mands public confidence is the one who is strong 
enough in his faith and large enough in his sym- 
pathies with other men to break down this bar. 
Look back over the whole record of history, and 



34 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

you find that the men who have done really great 
things have been, not the critics who pointed out 
and exaggerated the evils to be avoided, but the 
men of strong sympathies who recognized what 
was good. Napoleon knew better than any other 
man the defects of French military organization; 
but he won his victories primarily by a belief in 
the French army which made the French army 
believe in him. McClellan knew what to avoid 
better than Lincoln or Grant; but it was men of 
the type of Lincoln or Grant who brought a united 
nation out of the Civil War. The prophets who 
preceded Jesus criticised the evils of their time 
just as unsparingly as did Jesus himself, and at far 
greater length. The thing that he had and that 
they had not was the belief in the essential goodness 
of humanity which would respond positively to the 
gospel of self-sacrifice. He that would follow in 
the footsteps of the Master must be prepared, not 
simply to stand upright himself, but to have faith 
that others will stand by him. 

The scholars and scientific men of the country 
have sometimes been reproached with a certain in- 
difference to the feelings and sentiments of their 
fellow men. It has been said that their critical 
faculty is developed more strongly than their con- 



BELIEF IN MEN 35 

structive instinct; that their brain has been nour- 
ished at the expense of their heart ; that what they 
have gained in breadth of vision has been out- 
weighed by a loss of human sympathy. 

It is for us to prove the falseness of this charge. 
It is for us to show by our life and our utterances 
that we believe in the men who are working with 
us and about us. There will probably be times 
when this is a hard task. If we have studied 
history or literature or science aright some things 
which look large to other people will look small to 
us. We shall frequently be called upon to give the 
unwelcome advice that a desired end cannot be 
reached by a short cut; and this may cause some 
of our more enthusiastic friends to lose confidence 
in our leadership. There are always times when a 
man who is clear-headed is reproached with being 
hard-hearted. But if we ourselves keep our faith 
in our fellow men, these things, though they be 
momentary hindrances, will in the long run make 
for our power of Christian leadership. 

There was a time, not so very long ago, when 
the people distrusted the guidance of scientific men 
in things material. They believed that they could 
do their business best without the advice of the 
theorists. When it came to the conduct of affairs, 
scientific men and practical men eyed each other 



36 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

with mutual distrust. As long as the scientific men 
remained mere critics, this distrust remained. 
When they came to take up the practical problems 
of applied mechanics and physics and solve them 
positively in a large way, they became the trusted 
leaders of modern material development. 

It is for us to deal with the prof ounder problems 
of human life in the same way. It is for us to prove 
our right to take the lead in the political and social 
and spiritual development of the country, as well as 
in its mechanical and material development. To 
do this we must take hold of these social problems 
with the same positive faith with which our fathers 
took hold of the problems of applied science. To 
the man who believes in his fellow men, who has 
faith in his country, and in whom the love of the 
God whom he hath not seen is but an outgrowth of 
a love for his fellow men whom he hath seen, the 
opening years of the twentieth century are years 
of unrivalled promise. A man learns to love God 
by loving his fellow men, and to believe in God by 
believing in his fellow men. 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 

1912 

Whosoever will be chief among you, let him be your servant. 

The question is constantly asked whether our col- 
leges prepare their students to be successful in 
after life. In nine cases out of ten the man who 
asks this question measures success in terms of 
wealth. He thinks of the whole world as playing 
a game in which money is the prize and the man 
who makes most money the winner. If this were 
the right way to look at life, the inquiry would be 
an overwhelmingly important one. But it is an 
essentially wrong way to look at life ; and the nation 
which takes this view of things does so at its peril. 
The true measure of a man's success is the service 
which he renders, not the pay which he exacts fori 
it. The true measure of a man's ability is the 
power to help others and to contribute to their ad- 
vancement. The effort to make money is an im- 
portant incentive to social service and industrial 
progress; but the amount of wealth each man 
acquires is no accurate indication of the service he 
has rendered or the progress he has made possible. 
So far as his power of making money depends upon 



38 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

the value of what he has to offer to society, his 
income is a good measure of his usefulness. So far 
as it depends upon his ability and willingness to 
charge people all that his service is worth, or to 
persuade them that his service is more valuable 
than it really is, his income is a bad measure of his 
usefulness. No community can afford to treat 
money made by means like these as giving the 
possessor any valid claim to public approval. Chris- 
tianity and common sense alike forbid it. 

If any one were to ask whether West Point or 
Annapolis prepared men for success in after life we 
should see the absurdity of the question. It is true 
that many of the graduates of these institutions are 
able engineers or successful men of business. But 
it is not for the sake of these things that we estab- 
lished our military schools, and not by their success 
in producing engineers and business men that the 
value of these schools is measured. If every gradu- 
ate of these institutions went into engineering or 
into business and made a success of it, this would 
not prove that these institutions did the work we 
had a right to expect of them. Their work is to 
train men to uphold the honor and secure the safety 
of their country. The most fundamental lessons 
which they teach their students are those of loyalty 
and discipline and courage — ^not one of which has 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 39 

anything to do with making money, and all of 
which are at times liable to interfere with it. The 
officer must be prepared to sacrifice his comfort at 
the call of duty. He must know how to obey orders 
and how to give orders. He must have the courage 
which fears nothing except dishonor. "West Point 
and Annapolis are not primarily engaged in train- 
ing men for business ; they are engaged in training 
them for what they proudly call 'Hhe service/' 

The work which our colleges are undertaking to 
do for the country is in some respects a more diffi- 
cult one than that which falls to the lot of the mili- 
tary schools. The service for which we prepare is 
more varied; its safeguards and its rewards are 
more intangible ; its problems are newer and more 
perplexing. All the more reason is there, therefore, 
why our colleges and our college graduates should 
face the situation clearly and accept the burdens 
imposed upon them with their eyes open. 

To the military man public service means service 
in the employ of the government, with definite 
duties and under definite laws. To the college 
graduate the term has a wider meaning. The work 
that we do as office holders will be only a small 
fraction of the public service which we shall render 
and ought to render, y Any man who is charged 
with the responsibilities of a large business or an 



40 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

important profession has it in his power to serve 
the public just as effectively as if he were a paid 
employee of the government. Our modern civiliza- 1 
tion puts into the charge of business men or of pro- 
fessional men a great many things which other 
civilizations have regarded as functions of govern- 
ment. Each of us, whatever his line of life, is likely 
to have the power to direct the actions of hundreds 
of his fellows for good or for ill. The lawyer who 
practices law for purely selfish purposes may do the 
community as much harm as the judge who decides 
a question unfairly. The president of a large pri- 
vate corporation who manages his industry without 
reference to considerations of public policy may do 
as much harm as the head of a government depart- 
ment.// In order that we may meet our obligations 
as college men we must extend our ideals of public 
duty and traditions of public service to every line 
of life in which the interests of large bodies of 
people are entrusted to our discretion, whether our 
particular line of duty be labelled as a government 
department or not^-; 

The soldier is surrounded by safeguards which 
the commercial or professional man does not enjoy. 
He is set apart from other men by a uniform. He 
knows that the wearer of the uniform is expected 
to do the business of the nation instead of doing 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 41 

his own business ; that if he fails to do this he will 
be execrated, but that if he does this he will be 
respected and taken care of by the nation. The 
business or professional man has none of these en- 
couragements or assurances. If he regards himself 
as animated by a higher duty than his fellows, his 
fellows will consider him quixotic. If a man who 
wears the same clothes as other men and has no 
distinctive titles before his name lets public duty 
fall into the background for the sake of money or 
preferment, nobody will condemn him severely. 
If he sacrifices money or preferment for the sake 
of his public duty, he has no assurance that he will 
be taken care of or rewarded, except by the ap- 
proval of his own conscience and of a compara- 
tively small body of friends who understand his 
ideals. 

Nor is it easy for the professional or business man 
to know exactly what his duty is or exactly what 
sacrifices it demands of him. In nineteen cases out 
of twenty the soldier's public duty is a perfectly 
plain one. In nineteen cases out of twenty the 
civilian's public duty is a most doubtful one. We 
know approximately what we require of our army 
and navy in order that we may have security at 
home and respect abroad. We do not know what 
we require of our clergymen and lawyers and 



42 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

manTifacturers and merchants in order that indus- 
trial peace may be secured and industrial progress 
promoted. 

"We are living in the midst of a world whose 
material prosperity has outgrown its commercial 
law and commercial ethics. That law and those 
ethics were arranged to meet the needs of an age 
whose business conditions were very much simpler 
than those of today. Where a hundred different 
men were doing business independently, it was safe 
for the public to let each man charge whatever 
prices he could get, because if he tried to get an 
unfair profit others would bring the price down. 
It was safe to let each man make such terms with 
his workmen as he could, because if one man be- 
came involved in a labor dispute the public could 
buy what it needed from other producers until 
this particular dispute was settled. Under these 
circumstances we said, and said rightly, that each 
man fulfilled his public duty if he pursued his own 
interest in an intelligent and square way, without 
fraud or concealment. But as matters are today 
arranged, there are a great many instances where 
competition cannot be relied upon to produce fair 
prices, and a great many instances where disputes 
as to the terms of the labor contract are not a 
private concern of a few men, but involve large 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 43 

public interests of many kinds. Different methods 
have been proposed for dealing with these prob- 
lems. One man wants enforced competition; 
another urges complete publicity; a third recom- 
mends government regulation of prices or of wages ; 
a fourth advocates public ownership and manage- 
ment of industry. Each of these proposals may be 
right as a means of meeting a specific difficulty in 
some particular instance. Not one of them can 
claim to be a solution of the problem. We are in 
every instance trying to deal by statute with a 
difficulty which can only be solved by ethics. 

What form the industrial ethics of the future 
will take, and what reciprocal duties public opinion 
will impose upon consumer and upon producer, 
upon capitalist and upon laborer, I shall not 
undertake to predict. Two things, however, are 
certain : first, that any system of ethics which will 
meet the needs of the future will involve the accept- 
ance of the principle that private business is a 
public trust wherever the public welfare is affected 
by it; and second, that this idea must be applied 
with intelligence as well as with broad public 
purpose. 

The two must go together. Of all the difficulties 
that threaten us at the present day, and of all the 
obstacles which stand in the way of enlightened 



44 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

public sentiment, the worst that we have to deal 
with is a division of our leaders into two camps, one 
of which emphasizes the need of intelligence but 
holds narrow views of public duty, while the other 
takes broad views of public duty but underrates the 
need of intelligence. The man of brains thinks 
that he has a right to use his brains for his own 
benefit and that of those immediately associated 
with him, without being hampered by too much 
concern for the general welfare of humanity. The 
man of broad sympathies and strong emotions 
thinks that his concern for the welfare of humanity 
exempts him from the necessity of using his brains 
at all. One group is content to play the game of 
business and the game of politics on the old lines ; 
the other is anxious to apply remedies which would 
often prove worse than the disease we seek to cure. 
It is here that we have the highest opportunity 
for applying principles of Christian citizenship. 
The religion of Jesus Christ differs from almost 
every other religion in teaching, side by side and as 
part of the same system, the duty of self-sacrifice 
for humanity and the duty of intelligent adapta- 
tion of means to ends. On the Pharisees of his time, 
who were content to seek their own prosperity as 
a class under the old traditions and safeguards, 
Jesus urged the broad claims of humanity. For the 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 45 

agitators who were anxious to make use of present 
discontent as a means of overthrowing authority, 
he had a different message — a message of patience 
and tolerance and good sense. To the privileged 
classes Jesus seemed like a socialist; to the rabble 
he seemed like a conservative. Perhaps he was 
both. Perhaps the vitality of the Christian reli- 
gion rests on the fact that its founder was at once 
a socialist and a conservative; a socialist in the 
breadth of his sympathies and his aims, a conserva- 
tive in his distrust of political upheaval as a means 
of moral progress, and in his refusal to regard the 
transient waves of popular emotion as revelations 
of eternal truth. 

It is our duty as American college men to meet 
the need of moral leadership today in the same 
spirit as Jesus Christ met the need of moral leader- 
ship nineteen hundred years ago. To us it has been 
given to keep out of the struggles of modern busi- 
ness until we have had time to reach maturity. If 
we have studied science and history and literature 
to any purpose, we have obtained a better sense of 
the real value of different parts of life today than 
we had three or four years ago. We have not been 
compelled to fix our eyes upon the necessity of 
getting ahead of our fellow men in order to make 
a living. We have had time to think of the things 



46 y MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

that make nations great and allow the civilization of 
mankind to make progress. From its college men 
the community has a right to demand the spirit of 
public service. From its college men it has a right 
to demand also the intelligence which shall make 
that spirit useful. "What our country requires of 
us as Americans our religion requires of us as 
Christians. Let us here resolve that whatever our 
calling and whatever our line of work, it shall be 
inspired by the spirit of public service; and that 
whatever our religion and whatever our form of 
worship, it shall be Christian in this same highest 
sense. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: This is a 
place, and is known as a place, where the traditions 
of public service are strong. You have been living 
on consecrated ground. For more than two cen- 
turies, men who went out from these halls have been 
sacrificing themselves to meet the needs of the com- 
munity, accomplishing work whose full value was 
not appreciated for years afterwards. The country 
expects us to do for the future the kind of things 
that they did for the past, and make Yale stand in 
the next century, as she stands in the present cen- 
tury, for loyalty, for courage, for the subordination 
of individual ease and individual gain to public 



THE HONOR OF THE SERVICE 47 

ends of lasting importance. These are the tradi- 
tions of the service which we are called upon to 
maintain. Every failure to assume public respon- 
sibility will be noted by our fellow men to our 
discredit, just as surely as any flinching on the part 
of the soldier redounds to the discredit of his uni- 
form. Every instance of heroic work, great or 
small, even though it receive no material reward 
in the way of decoration or promotion, enhances 
the glory and strengthens the inspiration of this 
college, just as much as any deed of valor of the 
soldier on the field of battle strengthens the hold 
of the army upon its members and upon the 
country. 

All the traditions of this place call us to the 
service of God and of our fellow men. May it be 
our lot to follow in the footsteps of our fathers and 
face the problems of today in this same spirit of 
self-consecration; bound to our duty not by laws 
alone, or by creeds alone, but by the honor of the 
service. 



A CITIZEN OF ZION 

1911^ 

Lord, who shall abide in thy tabernacle? who shall dwell 
in thy holy hill? 

He that walketh uprightly, and worketh righteousness, and 
speaketh the truth in his heart. 

He that backbiteth not with his tongue, nor doeth evil to 
his neighbour, nor taketh up a reproach against his neigh- 
bour. 

In whose eyes a vile person is contemned; but he honour- 
eth them that fear the Lord. He that sweareth to his own 
hurt, and changeth not. 

He that putteth not out his money to usury, nor taketh 
reward against the innocent. He that doeth these things 
shall never be moved. 

In the quaint old chapter headings of the Bible, 
sometimes almost as suggestive as the contents of 
the chapters themselves, we find as the title of the 
fifteenth psalm, '^ David deseribeth a citizen of 
Zion." His verses are just as appropriate today 
as they were when they were first sung. 

I shall not try to add much to these words or to 
say much that is not already there. The citizen of 
Zion must be a straightforward man and a broad- 
minded man, a man of judgment and a man of 
principle. Let us simply stop and think what these 



A CITIZEN OF ZION 49 

qualities mean, and how we can use our college 
course in such a way as to acquire them. 

The citizen of Zion is a straightforward man. He 
is truthful in the large sense, and not merely in the 
small one. It is not enough to abstain from telling 
lies to other people. The citizen of Zion speaks the 
truth in his heart. He looks facts and consequences 
squarely in the face. The upright walk and the 
righteous work are an outcome of this habit of 
mind. They can be obtained in this way, and in 
this way only. 

The citizen of Zion is a broad-minded man. He 
is a man of charity in the large and splendid sense 
in which St. Paul uses the term. It is not enough 
to show our charity by a thoughtless generosity 
which gives away money easily. Generosity is a 
grand quality, and the giving of money for public 
purposes is a noble thing. But it falls short of the 
Christian ideal of charity. '^Though I bestow all 
my goods to feed the poor," says St. Paul, *'and 
have not charity, it profiteth me nothing." We 
must have generosity of thought no less than gener- 
osity of deed. He that backbiteth not with his 
tongue, nor doeth evil to his neighbor, nor taketh 
up a reproach against his neighbor, is the man of 
broad mind and large charity. 

The citizen of Zion is a man of judgment. He 



50 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

has the sense of proportion which enables him to 
value men and things according to their real worth. 
A vile thing means literally a cheap thing. He 
does not merely condemn vile persons and things ; 
he contemns them, despises them for the cheap 
shams that they are. He has learned the essential 
worthlessness of cheap jests and cheap books, cheap 
tricks and cheap successes — aye, and for that 
matter, cheap pretences of religion — so that all the 
weight of popular approbation which may happen 
to be thrown into their scale does not blind him 
to the inherent smallness of the person who achieves 
them. 

The citizen of Zion is a man of principle. He is 
not the kind of man that keeps asking, ^'What is 
there in this for mef He judges things objec- 
tively, without reference to the question whether he 
himself is being helped or hurt. If an innocent per- 
son is wronged he will not shut his eyes to the 
wrong because he happens to get a reward out of it. 
He will not take usurious advantage of the dis- 
tresses of others merely because it is his money that 
makes the profit. He will keep his oaths, whether 
they hurt him or help him. He mil not obscure 
his ideas of right and wrong by questions of per- 
sonal profit or loss. 

How can we ourselves, as a practical matter, ac- 



A CITIZEN OF ZION 51 

quire these qualities which are essential to Zion and 
to its citizens ? 

The first step is to recognize squarely the neces- 
sity of applying our brains to our conduct — of 
making mind and conscience work together instead 
of trying to use them separately. You will note 
that each of these virtues that David names is an 
intellectual one quite as much as a moral one. The 
practical difficulty of improving the public life of 
the community at the present day, social, financial, 
or political, is due far more to a certain kind of 
stupidity or of wilful blindness on the part of 
people in general than to any intent to do wrong. 
They will not deliberately violate the moral law; 
but they will shut their eyes to the real nature and 
consequence of things that they are doing, and will 
be astounded when you tell them that this is wrong. 
If we can make up our minds squarely and clearly 
that it is wrong, that for men situated as we are it 
is a great and overwhelming wrong, we shall have 
taken the first long step to prepare ourselves for 
the full privileges of citizenship in Zion. 

Having thus made up our minds, let us keep our 
eyes open to the consequences of our actions. Let 
us be truthful with ourselves. Let us see facts as 
they are, rather than as we want to see them. This 
is not easy. The easy way is to go with the crowd ; 



52 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

to shut our eyes to the things the crowd does not 
see and does not want to see. The man who has 
learned the habit of being truthful with himself, of 
facing facts and consequences instead of shirking 
them, has taken his second lesson in citizenship. 

Let us remember, in the next place, that he who 
repeats a lie does the same kind of wrong and harm 
as he who invents it. I do not know of any quality 
which is more needed in our public life and in our 
preparation for public life than an absolute refusal 
to repeat unproved tales to the detriment of others. 
Many a man who would be ashamed to start gossip 
or slander is willing to spread it. Many a man who 
would scorn to strike his neighbor behind his back 
is content to stab his neighbor's reputation by the 
utterance of half truths which are worse than lies 
in their effect. Many a man who is really desirous 
to make the world better so mixes his criticism of 
real evils with cowardly slaps at everybody who has 
accomplished anything as to make his well-meant 
efforts at reform worse than useless. In all contro- 
versies, from those of intercollegiate athletics to 
those of international politics, the well of inquiry — 
if I may quote Mr. Kipling's phrase — is so muddied 
with the stick of suspicion that clear thinking and 
ordered thinking become well-nigh impossible. 
4^ ; If we never repeat a damaging story until we are 



A CITIZEN OF ZION 53 

certain that we can prove it, we shall be astonished 
to find how rapidly our faith in our fellow men 
increases. When we find that nineteen-twentieths 
of the scandalous things that people are saying 
about each other are cowardly falsehoods, we soon 
acquire the habit of believing good instead of evil 
of those about us. This preference for believing 
good instead of evil will of itself make larger men 
of us and better Christians of us than we ever 
could begin to be without it. 

Straightforwardness and broad-minded charity 
are, I think, within the reach of all men who will 
try to attain them. Judgment is a harder quality 
to achieve. But it is this very quality which our 
college course, if we use it rightly, gives us excep- 
tional opportunities of attaining. 

The boy who goes early into professional life, 
who passes directly from the common school into 
the factory or from the high school into the office, 
has one single set of ideals constantly before him. 
The methods that he studies are the methods of his 
trade. The object of his ambition is to make as 
good a living as he can. In our college life and 
college work we have a chance for a wider view. 
We see more kinds of men ; we study more kinds of 
things. We have a larger horizon and we have the 
means of getting a truer perspective. 



54 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

But to make our perspective true we must inter- 
est ourselves in the things that are really large — 
in the works of literature which have been read by 
successive generations ; in the thoughts and acts of 
men who have made history on a large scale ; in the 
principles of science which stand for all time. The 
man who reads books of this kind learns to rate 
the cheap novel or cheap play at its true value. 
The man who cares for this kind of history can 
judge the current gossip of society and the current 
chicanery of finance or politics for what it is really 
worth. The man who studies science in such a way 
as to understand what the pursuit of truth means 
will soon see of how much less consequence are the 
smaller pursuits of life. I do not mean that we 
should stop reading novels or take less interest in 
current politics or try to keep out of the current 
pursuits of life; but that we should add thereto 
enough of the world's larger interests to give us a 
sense of the size of things as they come before us. 
And when once we study literature and history and 
science in ihis way, our intellectual life and our 
Christian life will join one another and work to- 
gether of themselves. To be a Christian means to 
follow in the footsteps of the man who, more than 
any one else that ever lived, saw things in their real 
sizes and proportions. 



A CITIZEN OF ZION 55 

If we can achieve straightforwardness and broad- 
mindedness and judgment, our principles may be 
trusted to grow stronger of themselves every day 
of our lives. Human nature is after all essentially 
and fundamentally good. If it were not, life would 
not be worth living. The evils that we have to fight 
are essentially evils of blindness. A man sees a 
little and thinks it is the whole. He sees his own 
case large and his neighbor's case small. Let men 
once apprehend a principle clearly and squarely, 
and they will stand up to it even at their own cost. 
Let them once believe that you see more than they 
do and are ready to follow the truth when it hurts 
you, and they will take you as their guide. Thus 
it is that peoples are led out of darkness into light. 
Thus it is that nations are made great. 

Our country needs citizens who are straight- 
forward enough to tell the truth to themselves, 
charitable enough to think no ill of their neighbors, 
sound of judgment to value men and things for 
what they really are, strong of principle to sink the 
ideal of self in the ideal of duty. He .that doeth 
these things shall never be moved. 



THE DUTY OF STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 

1915 

Wherefore putting away lying, speak every man truth with 
his neighbour: for we are members one of another. 

One of the most interesting and instructive chap- 
ters in modern history is the upbuilding of Eng- 
land's Indian empire. It was the work of strong 
men — bold in war, able in organization, devotedly 
loyal to their charge. But the thing that most im- 
pressed the Indian rulers and statesmen who met 
and yielded to the English was not the devotion, 
nor the organizing power, nor even the fighting 
power, great as all these were; but the fact that 
Englishmen habitually told the truth. 

Truthfulness was a quality foreign to Oriental 
diplomacy. Among Indians the most accomplished 
statesman was he who could most successfully de- 
ceive his opponents. The straightforward an- 
nouncement of a man's real intentions seemed 
suicidal. The keeping of promises when the end for 
which they were made had been gained looked like 
wilful disregard of opportunity. But as time went 
on the suicidal policy was justified. The apparent 
disregard of opportunity opened the way to new 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 57 

and larger opportunities. The ruler who had a 
treaty with the English government or a promise 
from an agent of the English company felt that he 
could rely on it. If native was allied with native 
each had to guard himself against treachery in the 
rear ; if native was allied with Englishman the two 
could work together against a common foe. It was 
on this basis that English dominion in India was 
built up and consolidated. 

Nor is this an isolated case. The keeping of 
treaties and promises is the one thing that enables 
a nation to hold its head high among other nations. 
A momentary success may be achieved by a policy 
of deceit; enduring empire belongs to the people 
that best knows how to keep faith. We think of the 
power of the Roman republic as won by force of 
arms. But the Carthaginians and the Macedonians 
and the Gauls themselves had their full share of 
victories in their wars with the Romans. That 
which distinguished the Roman from the Gaul or 
the Macedonian, or even from the Carthaginian, 
was straightforwardness and steadiness of policy. 

And what holds true of nations holds true of 
individuals. It may occasionally happen that a 
man of brilliant parts can disregard his promises 
with apparent success and build up an empire or a 
fortune on the basis of broken contracts. But 



58 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

achievement of this kind is a precarious and tran- 
sient thing, which falls to pieces when the brain 
that planned it begins to lose its power. It is not 
the man like Louis XIV or Frederick that leaves 
the most enduring mark on the pages of history; 
it is the man like "Washington or William of 
Orange — ^the man who is trusted as well as admired. 

This lesson has its highest importance to us here 
in America, who live in a democracy and who seek 
to succeed, not by setting ourselves apart from 
other men but by striving with them toward a 
common end. To make our work enduring we must 
work with others. To be able to work with others 
we must tell them the truth. "Without mutual trust 
the cooperation of free citizens toward a common 
end is impossible. The whole fabric of American 
society rests on the assumption that we are going 
to be honest in our dealings. Truthfulness in word 
and in act, strict fulfillment of every obligation, 
straightforwardness in meeting all promises, ex- 
pressed or implied, independent of the temporary 
gain or loss to ourselves, are the things that give us 
the right and power to be members of a free com- 
monwealth. It is a part of our religious creed as 
well as of our political duty. 

This should be the ideal of all of us. It is the 
ideal of most of us. Yet in practice we fall lamen- 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 59 

tably short of reaching our ideal. I want to say a 
few plain words about the actual reasons for this 
failure, and the possible means at our command for 
bringing our practice up to the standard. 

The first thing to note is that there are three 
different kinds of untruthfulness, due to quite 
distinct causes. One man lies and cheats because 
he is frightened. Another lies and cheats because 
he expects to gain an advantage for himself or his 
fellows. A third lies and cheats because he sees 
others do it and is content to follow the fashion. 
We have the untruthfulness of timidity, the un- 
truthfulness of intellectual subtlety, and the un- 
truthfulness of perverted social instinct. The re- 
sults are similar in the three cases ; the origin and 
motives are different. We have to deal with three 
kinds of sin instead of one; and I am convinced 
that it will help us both in our thinking and in our 
action if we get this separation clearly made at 
the very outset. 

The first, and probably the commonest, form of 
untruthfulness is due to timidity — mental and 
moral panic. A man lies because he is frightened. 
He knows that he ought to tell the truth, and in 
calmer moments he intends to tell the truth; but 
under the influence of overpowering terror he seeks 
some weak evasion. 



60 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

This is the kind of lying that is most universally 
condemned. It is unlovely in its origin; it is in- 
efficient in its results. It is a blind and unpre- 
meditated effort to cheat which, like other blind 
and unpremeditated efforts, is unsuccessful and 
speedily punished. But for that very reason, 
perhaps, it is also the kind that is least dangerous 
to society. It is deceit which does not deceive. It 
is cowardice rather than lying. 

Far more effective, and for that reason more 
dangerous, is the second kind of untruthfulness: 
the evasion and misstatement due to intellectual 
subtlety; the deliberate fraud which a man prac- 
tices in order to gain an end that appears to him 
desirable. 

Unlike the instinctive lie of the coward, the pre- 
meditated lie of the deceiver often appears to 
accomplish its purpose. A man may win a game 
by a trick that deceives the umpire, or a prize by 
a falsehood that deceives the examiner. He may 
gain a fortune by an advertisement that misleads 
the consumer, or an election by a speech that mis- 
leads the voter. Nor will the end always be a 
purely selfish one. Many a man will cheat in 
politics from motives which are largely patriotic. 
Some of the worst treachery in the world ^s whole 
history has been intended to promote the kingdom 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 61 

of God. But whether the end be selfish or unselfish, 
a course of deceit is a foolish way of trying to reach 
it. Even when fraud appears most successful, the 
gain from such success is usually limited and tran- 
sient; while the loss which comes from forfeiture 
of confidence is large and permanent. The man 
who prides himself on his intellectual subtlety gets 
the thing immediately in front of him and credits 
that gain to his skill. He misses a dozen other 
things that go to the straightforward man, and 
thinks himself unlucky in so doing. But what he 
calls ill luck is usually the indirect effect of his 
deceit, which he, with all his cleverness, has not 
been subtle enough to trace. 

In point of fact, no man sees far enough into 
consequences to make it safe for him to enter upon 
a course of deceit. The greatest English whist 
player of his generation, James Clay, once said, ' ' I 
never knew a man addicted to the use of false cards 
who was really successful at the whist table. In 
trying to deceive his adversaries, he always did 
more harm by deceiving his partner." If this be 
true in whist, where there are but fifty-two cards 
and only one partner, what shall be the case in the 
complex affairs of life, with the multitude of part- 
ners and an infinity of varying conditions ! 

And in the few cases where the deceiver really 



62 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

gains his end and wins the prize on which he has 
set his heart, there are other things that come with 
it which turn the gain to loss. The man who has 
forfeited the confidence of his fellow men can no 
longer associate with others on a basis of mutual 
trust. Success gained on these terms sets a man 
apart from his fellows — admired, perhaps, by the 
multitude, but envied and hated instead of being 
loved and adored. Few indeed of those who say- 
glibly that honesty is the best policy know how 
profoundly true this maxim proves itself, even in 
cases which they deem to be exceptions. 

But there is a third form of untruthfulness and 
dishonesty which is yet more subtle and dangerous 
than the second : the untruthfulness and dishonesty 
which comes from blindly following fashions in 
thought and feeling which have taken possession of 
those about us. The temptation to this sort of 
untruthfulness is more subtle because a man de- 
ceives himself as well as others, and thinks that 
wrong things are right, or at least not very wrong, 
if his friends do them. It is more dangerous be- 
cause the man who joins the community in ac- 
cepting wrong standards, instead of asserting inde- 
pendence by making right ones of his own, may find 
an easy road to leadership among his fellows and 
win their approval most when he least deserves it. 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 63 

It is proverbial that a crowd will indulge in 
many acts of stupidity or brutality which very few 
individual members of the crowd would undertake 
by themselves. The stronger a man's social instinct 
is, the more he is inclined to go with the multitude 
and do things which he afterward sees to have been 
foolish or wicked. All this is commonly explained 
by saying that a crowd has no conscience. I think 
it would be truer to say that a crowd has no percep- 
tions. An individual acting for himself keeps his 
eyes open. A member of a crowd has eyes for what 
the crowd sees and ears for what the crowd hears. 
If the leaders say a thing is white the crowd is 
hypnotized into seeing it white even if it be black 
as ink. The man who abandons himself to the 
movement of such an unthinking mass, whether he 
be at the front or at the rear, becomes possessed 
by a sort of mental intoxication under which he 
loses all sense of evidence. One man voices a sus- 
picion; his neighbor repeats it as a charge; in a 
few moments it has been accepted by the crowd as 
a statement of fact. If each man examined the 
evidence for himself no man would believe it for a 
moment. Yet when the crowd thinks it is true 
every one, or almost every one, is content to accept 
this collective emotion in lieu of evidence ; to make 
statements that are at variance with the facts, and 



64 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

to countenance or excuse dishonorable practices 
on flimsy or fictitious grounds. 

In civilized society the impulses and emotions of 
the individual are seldom very dangerous. When 
a man feels a savage desire to kill or to steal, society 
defends itself by putting him into prison or into an 
insane asylum, according to the circumstances of 
the particular case. But when the whole body 
politic is possessed by the same emotion there is no 
one to repress it. The newspapers and magazines 
make their profit in stimulating the mistakes which 
lead to savagery. Politicians find that they lose 
votes by trying to correct the error and gain votes 
by encouraging it. The blind are leaders of the 
blind, and both fall into the ditch. 

This form of self-deceit is perilous alike to the 
individual and the community. The individual 
gets the habit of disclaiming moral responsibility. 
He lets his own brain and conscience go unused so 
often that he cannot rely on either of them as a 
sure defense against overmastering impulse in 
grave emergencies of any kind. The community is 
exposed to the danger that public affairs will be 
guided by organized emotion instead of by 
intelligence. 

Under the influence of suspicion or emotion the 
public shuts its eyes to the truth until truth and 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 65 

falsehood become indistinguishable. From this 
come Sicilian vespers and massacres of St. Bar- 
tholomew. From this came the crucifixion itself. 
Jesus of Nazareth was the victim of popular sus- 
picion and prejudice. The most enlightened and 
honorable class of the community, who should have 
been his friends, were gradually brought into an 
attitude of unreasoning hostility to him. The 
prejudice of the Pharisee and the prejudice of the 
people so interacted on one another that-none could 
see the good in Jesus, and all joined in crying, 
'^Crucify him!" Such is the end of blind self- 
deceit. 

How can we avoid these several forms of evil? 
Only by a rigid course of training of the brain, the 
emotions, and the conscience. 

In the first place, we must acquire the habit of 
looking into evidence. We must stop buying the 
newspaper that tells what we wish was true, and 
buy the one that tries to tell what really is true. 
We must refuse to repeat unproved gossip or scan- 
dal merely because we like it. This will soon grow 
into the habit of not liking it. We shall learn to 
hate the unconscious lie as well as the intentional 
one. There may sometimes be a question whether 
we should tell the truth to others who cannot see it 
or understand it; there can be no question at all 



66 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

that we should tell it to ourselves. And when a 
man has learned to tell the truth to himself, the 
problem of telling it to others becomes compara- 
tively simple. 

We must so study history and science and litera- 
ture as to fill our minds with ideals and aspirations 
that are permanently important. The man who 
really takes hold of the lessons of history is pro- 
tected against most of the temptations to political 
trickery. The man who is fired with the ideals of 
scientific discovery or of public service is not likely 
to try to parade a sham science as if it were a real 
one. The man who has read to any purpose the 
classical dramas of the ancient and modern world 
and the great drama unfolded in the Holy Bible 
learns not to sell his birthright for a mess of pot- 
tage. Such men know how to see things in their 
right size. 

We must overcome cowardice as a soldier over- 
comes cowardice — by discipline ; by doing promptly 
and automatically the routine duties of life that 
look unpleasant and dangerous, until the emotion 
of fear is crowded out. The self-discipline needed 
against cowardice is different for different men. 
The man who finds it hard to be punctual gains 
courage by following the stroke of the clock as a 
matter of course. The man who finds it difficult 



STRAIGHTFORWARDNESS 67 

to pay his debts gains courage by paying cash. 
The man who is tempted to an undue dread of 
physical labor and pain gains courage by never 
shirking. The actual time or money or pain in- 
volved may be a small thing; the habit of dis- 
ciplined action is an overwhelmingly large thing. 
Finally, we must remember, in season and out of 
season, that moral responsibility is not a thing 
which can be delegated. Our souls are our own — 
to be saved by facing facts as they are, or to be 
lost by shutting our eyes to them. Whatever can 
best help us to this sense of responsibility — creed, 
ritual, or philosophy — ^will help us more than all 
things else to know the truth and tell it. 



THE DUTY OF INDEPENDENT THINKING 

1919 

Ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free. 

The keynote of the world's older religions was 
obedience. Man was surrounded by supernatural 
powers whose ways he could not hope to under- 
stand. The favor of these powers depended on 
compliance with their orders as revealed through 
the priesthood. Destruction awaited the tribe that 
disobeyed them or allowed any of its members to 
disobey them. The religious man was one who 
recognized unquestioningly the rules and traditions 
thus sanctioned. 

These ancient religions represented all different 
stages of enlightenment. Some were based on 
abject superstition, others on theology of a high 
and noble kind. Some prescribed rules of conduct 
which were cruel and foul ; others had codes which 
are in harmony with the best standards of today. 
But amid all their variations of form and content, 
they agreed in this : they always kept the idea of 
command before men's minds, and made the 
authority of the lawgiver the one supreme reason 
why people should follow the law. 



INDEPENDENT THINKING 69 

In contrast to all these theories and all these 
codes, Jesus preached a rational morality. He 
taught men to judge the merit of actions by their 
effect upon mankind. The law of Moses was the 
best of the ancient codes ; and in general Jesus ad- 
vised his disciples to follow that law. But where 
obedience to the letter of Moses' law meant viola- 
tion of the spirit, Jesus taught them to think for 
themselves; to fulfill the purpose instead of con- 
forming to the words of command. 

One of the best features of the Mosaic law was its 
provision of a day of rest for all mankind. In the 
Jewish account of creation God himself was repre- 
sented as resting on the seventh day, and devout 
believers were required to follow his example in 
this respect. The Pharisees looked askance at 
Jesus because he exercised his powers of healing on 
the sabbath day. Jesus summarized the issue be- 
tween himself and the Pharisees in one pregnant 
question : ^ ' Is it lawful on the sabbath days to do 
good, or to do evil ? to save life, or to destroy it ? " 
He who understands the spirit of Christian teach- 
ing sees that the man who makes the divinely 
ordained day of rest an excuse for failure to do his 
plain duty to humanity is still under what Paul 
calls the bondage of the law. Such a man makes 
the institution of the sabbath an end in itself, 



70 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

instead of a means to the good of humanity. He 
falls back on the letter as an excuse for neglecting 
the spirit. 

It is the very essence and heart of Christianity 
that it teaches people to reason about morals for 
themselves ; to judge the rightness of an action, not 
by its conformity to the past, but by its effect on 
the future. I do not mean that Christianity was 
the only religion that ever taught its disciples to 
reason, or that Jesus was the only religious leader 
who abandoned traditional morality in favor of 
rational morality. Every great prophet has done 
this to some extent. Confucius and Buddha each 
taught their followers to think for themselves, 
instead of letting others do their thinking for them. 
Isaiah denounced those who were content to obey 
the letter of the law, and appealed for the observ- 
ance of its spirit. But Christianity has spread the 
thinking habit wider than other religions. The 
teaching of Jesus may not have been more spiritual 
than that of Isaiah, nor more unselfish than that of 
Buddha, but it took more hold on the conduct of 
practical men. 

The fact that Christianity makes this appeal to 
reason renders it stronger in time of stress than a 
religion which appeals to authority only. 

The fear of the Lord is the beginning of wisdom ; 



INDEPENDENT THINKING 71 

but it is by no means the end or culmination of 
wisdom. If a man has been taught to obey religious 
rules simply because he is afraid the gods will 
punish him for violating them, anything that casts 
doubt upon the power of those gods, or the 
authority of the priests through whom they have 
revealed their will, takes away all reason for right 
conduct. A defeat in battle may shake the very 
foundations of such a religion, by casting doubt on 
the power of the tribal god. A rational explanation 
of what was previously supposed to be a miracle 
may undermine a system of morals based on 
priestly commands. But the man who loves God 
as well as fears him, and follows Jesus because he 
is pointing the way to a world of human sympathy 
and happiness, instead of one of mutual distrust 
and cruelty, does not need to have his religion au- 
thenticated by miracles or vindicated by success in 
battle. The man who believes a thing simply be- 
cause it is in the Bible views every advance of 
modern exegesis with apprehension. The man who 
believes in the precepts of the Bible because they 
show him what he needs and what his fellow men 
need is not thus easily shaken. As long as Chris- 
tianity makes good men and helps them to know 
what is good for other men, the theory of inspira- 
tion and the existence of miracles are matters of 



72 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

but secondary importance. If the church can ac- 
complish these results it is indeed set upon a rock. 

This kind of religion, which demands indepen- 
dent thought from its disciples and which finds its 
justification in results rather than in tradition, 
constitutes the one secure basis for civil liberty. 

Two years ago we engaged in a war which was 
to make the world safe for democracy. The war is 
over, but the perils of democracy seem as great in 
1919 a^ they did in 1917. The danger that free 
institutions will be crushed by armed force from 
outside is indeed less; but the danger that they will 
break down through the war of misunderstandings 
and passions within each community is greater 
than ever. 

This is no new experience. The democracies of 
the past have had more to fear from foes within 
than from foes without. The French republic of 
1792 was strong enough to withstand the combined 
assaults of Great Britain, Prussia, Austria, and 
Russia, but it was shaken to its foundation by the 
excesses of the Terror and was finally brought to an 
end by the incompetence of the Directory. The 
English Commonwealth of the seventeenth century 
was able to laugh at the threats of foreign powers. 
It was undermined by the ignorance or fanaticism 
of its own component elements. Look at Venice or 



INDEPENDENT THINKING 73 

Florence, Rome or Athens, and we see the same 
story repeated, the same lesson reinforced. People 
whose morals have been based on authority instead 
of reason, on fear instead of love, need to have 
their constitutional law administered by rulers of 
whom they are afraid. Give political freedom to 
a group of men who are not accustomed to govern 
themselves, and farsighted management of public 
affairs becomes an impossibility from the start. 
If such men remain under the sway of the religion 
of their fathers, the name of liberty becomes a cloak 
for the excesses of fanaticism. If they break loose 
from that sway they are led to the yet worse 
excesses of anarchism. Self-government is impos- 
sible without intelligent unselfishness — the kind of 
intelligent unselfishness that Jesus taught two 
thousand years ago. 

Our fathers realized that freemen must be intelli- 
gent ; and it was for this avowed reason that they 
established public school systems, which have been 
constantly enlarged and improved until the present 
day. Some of the founders of the American com- 
monwealth believed that knowledge was the one 
thing needful and that unselfishness would follow 
in due time, as a matter of course ; others thought 
that if the schools provided knowledge, the Chris- 



74 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

tian Church would secure the needed unselfishness 
in its use. 

These hopes have not been fully realized. The 
widening of the course of study in our public 
schools has not been accompanied by a correspond- 
ing increase of political wisdom. Two-thirds of the 
things which are taught in our high schools and 
colleges have little effect in making people better 
citizens. But in spite of this apparent failure, our 
fathers were fundamentally right. Education is 
needed to make a man a good citizen and a good 
Christian — ^probably more needed today than ever 
before. It is our problem — at once a political and 
a religious problem — to see what are the essentials 
of education necessary for this purpose, and to set 
ourselves to the work of mastering them. 

There are three different kinds of lessons which 
a student may learn. He may increase his range 
of knowledge, so as to become a broader man; a 
man of culture in the truest and best sense of the 
word. He may lay the foundation for greater 
success in the calling which he expects to pursue 
in after life, so as to become a more efficient man ; 
a man grounded in the theory of his profession. 
Or he may try to get certain habits and methods of 
work which will enable him to see straight, and 
to view things in their right size ; to become, accord- 



INDEPENDENT THINKING 75 

ing to the measure of his powers, a man of vision 
and judgment. 

It is this third sort of education, the discipline 
that gives us power to see straight, that is all-im- 
portant as a preparation for Christianity and a 
basis for democracy. Culture is a valuable thing, 
and the more we can have of it the better. But the 
history of the Italian Renaissance shows how men 
can devote themselves so exclusively to culture that 
they become bad citizens and bad Christians. Pro- 
fessional efficiency is a valuable thing, and it is 
good to lay the foundations for it as early as we 
can. But the example of Germany shows us how a 
nation can develop professional efficiency to the 
very highest degree, and yet miss altogether the 
, habits and powers of mind which are essential to 
political freedom and Christian conduct. Vision 
and judgment are the things that make a people 
great and that qualify a man to be a leader among 
free men. And while they are not things which can 
be taught by a college instructor except in a limited 
degree, they are in a surprisingly large degree 
things which can be learned by a college student 
if he will set himself to the work. 

Vision means seeing straight, seeing things as 
they are. This is a rarer quality than most men 
suppose. People are blinded by prejudice. They 



76 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

see what they want to see — sometimes because of 
laziness, sometimes because of timidity, sometimes 
because of selfishness. They choose the newspaper 
whose headlines please them, the orator whose 
phrases fit in with their preconceived ideas. Never 
finding out things for themselves, they are at the 
mercy of the editor or speaker who gives them facts 
at second hand. The habit of getting at things for 
ourselves is a thing which we can acquire here in 
college, at the price of constant hard work and a 
good many failures. By looking up the word in the 
dictionary instead of in the translation, by under- 
standing the propositions of science instead of re- 
peating them by rote, by learning the meaning of 
historical evidence and the application of the rules 
of evidence to the ordinary problems of life — in all 
these ways we learn to use our own eyes instead of 
being dependent on those of other people. 

Judgment means seeing things in their right size. 
The college man has a better chance than almost 
any one else to measure the value of different things 
one against another and get a true philosophy of 
life. The boy who has to go early into the work of 
making a living is thrown with one kind of men 
and one set of ideas, and is prone to overestimate 
the importance of his own professional standards. 
The boy who has time for a college course meets 



INDEPENDENT THINKING 77 

different kinds of men and gets into contact with 
different kinds of ideas, ancient as well as modern. 
He has the chance to see which things have lasted. 
He can study the permanent lessons of history 
instead of confining his attention to the transitory 
ones of current politics. 

We are living in a place which for two centuries 
has had ideals and traditions of its own. It is a 
place where we try to pursue scientific truth rather 
than commercial gain ; to use the lessons of history 
in judging the political events of daily life; to 
know the best ideals of poetry, to lift us above the 
prose of our daily work. He who lays his mind 
fully open to these influences, in the class room and 
out of it, is learning to know the truth which has 
made men free. To him and to men who are 
trained as he is trained, the nation must look for 
leadership in solving the twin problems of civ- 
ilization — the problems of democracy and of 
Christianity. 



THE UNION OF FAITH AND INTELLI- 
GENCE 

1910 

Add to your faith virtue, and to virtue knowledge. 

Thank God, gentlemen, that you are bom into 
an age of faith and into a land of faith — into an 
atmosphere charged as never before with positive 
working beliefs which make life worth living. 

"We sometimes hear a contrary opinion expressed. 
Many good people will tell you that this is an age 
when faith has decayed; an age when the human 
race has lost its belief in the things which are most 
necessary to its life here and hereafter. This is a 
wrong view. "We have lost faith in some things, 
but we have gained faith in others ; and the faiths 
that we have gained are greater in number and 
importance and inspiration than the faiths that we 
have lost. We have lost faith in signs and portents 
and supernatural manifestations of power; in cer- 
tain dogmas and formulas once supposed to be 
essential to salvation. We have gained in their 
place faith in man, faith in law, faith in the truths 
of nature, and faith in the God of justice. 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 79 

It is natural enough that those who have been 
brought up to rely on the externals or accidents of 
the older faith, rather than on its spirit and its sub- 
stance, should feel that we have lost more than we 
have gained. If a man believed in God more on 
account of the miracles that he is said to have 
wrought at certain times than on account of the 
mighty works that he shows us every day, a weak- 
ening of the belief in miracles meant a loss of faith 
in the underlying moral purpose of the universe. 
If he did right solely because a verbally inspired 
Bible told him to, any doubt about the verbal in- 
spiration of the Bible seemed to take away the 
whole reason for doing right. But this is a narrow 
and superficial view of life. Belief in the miracu- 
lous has had its place, and belief in verbal inspira- 
tion has had its place. But these things represent 
at best only the scaffolding which has helped to 
build up the edifice of human faith. Once the 
building might have fallen if the scaffolding was 
taken down; now its removal means only that the 
edifice is in condition to stand for and by itself. 
We must not, indeed, disregard the feelings and 
prejudices of those who were brought up in the 
older faith by unnecessary denial of their premises 
or disregard of their observances; but we may 
thank God that our faith rests on surer founda- 



80 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

tions than the completeness of the evidence for this 
or that miracle, or than the verbal authenticity of 
this or that Scriptural passage. 

We have faith in man. We believe in our 
friends. We believe in the essential good will of 
those with whom we have to do. Nay, more; we 
believe in the human race as a whole. We believe 
that its instincts and motives are fundamentally 
right ; and that if we can remove the ignorance and 
misery by which so large a part of its members have 
been burdened we can give them not only new 
comforts and new knowledge but new spiritual life. 
The man of today finds in the improvement of the 
conditions of his brother men not only a duty but 
an inspiration. 

We have faith in society. We believe not only in 
what the individual human units will do, but in 
what the organized life of the community will do. 
We believe in our country. We believe in the laws 
that it can make at home and in the things that it 
will stand for abroad. We have enough faith to 
make our patriotism no mere burden, but a cher- 
ished possession of our souls. 

We have faith in the truths of nature. This is 
an even more distinctive feature of our twentieth 
century life than either of the others which I have 
named. We believe that the world about us is 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 81 

governed by laws, and we care for the discovery of 
those laws; not only for the sake of the practical 
results which they place in our hands, but for the 
inspiration obtained by the fuller and better under- 
standing of the mysteries of the universe. We have 
learned as never before to 

Look through Nature up to Nature ^s God. 

And we have faith in the God of justice. We 
may not always call this God by the same name 
that our fathers did. We may not surround him 
by the same attributes with which our fathers in- 
vested him. We may shrink from appealing to 
him under the old forms, or sometimes even from 
calling upon him with the old freedom. But we 
have in our hearts, and I believe more firmly than 
ever before, the conviction that at the heart of the 
universe there is a Supreme Being on the side of 
right ; and this belief, however much we may shrink 
from formulating it in words, is strong enough to 

Uphold us, cherish, and have power to make 
Our noisy years seem moments in the being 
Of the Eternal Silence. 

It is profound enough to make us care very little 
on which side the majority votes, or on which side 
our interests lie, if we see clearly what is right and 
honorable and in the truest sense Christian. 

But do we see straight? Do we face things as 



82 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

they are? Do we have virtue and knowledge in 
proportion to our faith ? Do we keep clear of vain 
imagination ? I wish I were sure of the answers to 
these questions. I wish I could think that the 
world today is as sound of head as it is right of 
heart. The thing for which there is crying need 
among our good men is intelligence. The thing in 
which they most conspicuously fall short of the 
standard set by Christ or preached by Paul is 
intelligence. For one man who works evil by want 
of heart there are ten who work evil by want of 
thought. 

I do not mean that the present age has any 
monopoly in this respect. I do not mean that we 
are less intelligent in our conduct than our fathers 
were. I incline to believe that there has been a 
decided improvement in the readiness of people to 
think about their conduct and its consequences. 
But I do doubt whether the improvement has kept 
pace with the need. We have larger ideals today 
than ever before. We give ourselves and we give 
other people more freedom in the choice of ways 
for reaching them. The glorious liberty of the 
gospel is realized today in a sense in which it was 
never previously realized. But the extent of our 
liberty means an increased chance of making mis- 
takes ; and the loftiness of our ideals means that we 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 83 

sometimes may carry those mistakes to monumental 
lengths before people recognize what has happened. 
The very things which make life most worth living 
today accentuate the evil consequences of living it 
wrong. 

There are several classes of mistakes to which the 
present age is specially subject and which are 
specially dangerous because they come so nearly in 
line with the most glorious ideals of twentieth 
century religion. Our faith in man may lead us 
into an easy-going tolerance which is neither in- 
telligent nor Christian. Our faith in society may 
lead us to countenance the mistakes, if not the 
excesses, of socialism. Our faith in science may be 
carried to the point of scientific bigotry. Our faith 
that God is fighting on the side of right may blind 
us to the responsibilities that we ourselves have in 
that fight. 

Let me take these points up in order. 

Among the leaders of the civil war General Grant 
was distinguished by a large-minded faith in men. 
It was a great source of strength to him ; a virtue 
that perhaps counted for more than all others in 
making his career a success. He spent upon the 
work that was before him the energies that other 
people wasted in distrusting or backbiting their 
associates ; and the result justified his faith and his 



84 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

wisdom. But when he came into the presidency he 
carried this belief in his friends to unreasonable 
lengths. If he liked a man he at once had faith in 
him ; and that faith under the new conditions often 
proved to be badly misplaced. As a result the 
years of Grant's second administration were among 
the most corrupt in the history of our country ; and 
people for a time lost their admiration of Grant's 
greatness in their indignation at his mistakes. If 
you are going to trust men you must take the 
trouble to judge them. The extreme of indis- 
criminate trust without judgment is about as bad 
as the extreme of indiscriminate criticism without 
faith. No man can do a really large work who 
does not believe in his friends; but by that same 
token, the man who chooses his friends wrongly or 
who confides in them without discrimination is 
foredoomed to do his work wrong. 

The danger of undiscriminating friendship is so 
obvious that I shall not dwell upon it longer. Less 
obvious, but perhaps on that account all the more 
dangerous, is the evil of undiscriminating reliance 
upon law. 

In the decades which have elapsed since my 
graduation there has been a remarkable change of 
public sentiment on these matters. Thirty or forty 
years ago intelligent Americans were believers in 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 85 

liberty. They thought that government inter- 
ference was an evil, and that the legislation which 
reformers invoked to stop special abuses would 
generally create more evils than it would prevent. 
Today all this has changed. ''The new democ- 
racy," said a clear-sighted critic about the begin- 
ning of this period that I have named, '4s 
passionately benevolent and passionately fond of 
power." The combination is a dangerous one — 
how dangerous is perhaps best indicated by the 
events of the first French revolution, whose pro- 
moters loved liberty, equality, and fraternity so 
much that they indulged in a carnival of riot and 
murder almost unparalleled in recent history. 
This is of course an extreme instance ; but it is the 
kind of mistake which any one is likely to make 
who has more faith in government and law than 
intelligence as to the way in which government and 
law must be administered. The desire to make 
men happy is a praiseworthy thing; the impulse 
to use government authority for this purpose is a 
natural one ; but if there is any point where vague 
sentimentalism is dangerous and where faith needs 
to be combined with virtue and knowledge in order 
to have any merit at all, it is in rendering to Caesar 
the things that are Caesar's and unto God the 
things that are God's. 



86 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Almost equally characteristic of the present day- 
is the danger that our faith in science may be 
carried to the point of bigoted intolerance of any 
philosophy of life except that which is based on 
particular fields of science. This is not to be 
wondered at. In chemistry and physics and 
biology the nineteenth century has discovered a 
great many truths which were not known before, 
and has made these discoveries the means of in- 
creasing man 's power over nature and ameliorating 
the lot of the human race. But there is on this 
very account great danger that we shall over- 
estimate both the practical value of what has been 
accomplished and the theoretical certainty of many 
of our doctrines. The man who would make the 
right use of scientific truth must know the limita- 
tions of scientific truth. It is a good thing to 
increase the production of food; it may become a 
bad thing if it leads a man to deny that there are 
any other standards of progress except material 
ones. It is a good thing to be familiar with the 
laws of mathematical physics; it may become a 
bad thing if it leads one to think that these are the 
only laws worth knowing. I would not say one 
word which could lessen the enthusiasm of the 
scientific devotee for his specialized knowledge, or 
lessen the public faith in the value both of the 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 87 

results and of the spirit of discovery by which they 
are obtained. But let us remember that the field 
is a limited one, and that the greatest men of 
science have recognized its limitations. The posi- 
tion of the agnostic, who does not know or care for 
anything beyond the results of natural science, is 
a startling example of what comes to a man who 
exercises faith without intelligence. In theory the 
agnostic is the man who does not claim to know 
anything that he cannot prove — a praiseworthy 
aspiration. In practice he too often thinks that 
he has realized this aspiration when he has simply 
undervalued other fields of study than his own. 

Our faith in God, as we today hold it, is based 
on our faith in men, our faith in law, and our faith 
in science. It is for that very reason subject to 
a combination of the dangers which beset all three 
of them — the danger of a complacent optimism, 
which looks so firmly for the ultimate triumph of 
the right that it sometimes loses sight of the means 
which appear to be necessary to keep the world 
moving in the right direction. 

There is no field — I say it reverently — in which 
it is so necessary to combine intelligence with faith 
as in our idea of God. This is peculiarly true 
today, because today for the first time each man is 
encouraged to develop his own conception of what 



88 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

God is like and what God wants. In former days 
men were bound down by creeds which described 
in detail God's attributes and God's wishes. You 
accepted him as he was pictured in those creeds or 
you rejected him altogether. Today we try to 
judge for ourselves regarding God's attributes and 
God's wishes. Of all the responsibilities which go 
with the exercise of private judgment, this is the 
greatest. When Robert IngersoU said, ^^An honest 
God 's the noblest work of man, ' ' he uttered a pro- 
found truth, which many who profess to be more 
religious than he may well take to heart. You call 
your God the God of justice; see to it that your 
faith takes such shape that you could worship him 
only by doing justice. You call your God the God 
of love ; see that your faith is so shaped as to make 
you give love instead of merely trying to receive 
it. You call him the God of battles — and this is 
perhaps in a really masculine faith the highest title 
of all. See that your trust in him is an inspiration 
to you to take your part in the battles both with 
courage and with intelligence; for otherwise that 
faith is mere blasphemous idolatry. The soldier 
who fights without faith fights badly; but the sol- 
dier also fights badly who fights with such blind 
faith that he relaxes his watchfulness, his intelli- 
gence, or his sense of personal responsibility. This 



FAITH AND INTELLIGENCE 89 

is true in the physical warfare between nation and 
nation ; it is yet more profoundly true in the great 
moral war between right and wrong. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: It is a dis- 
tinctive feature of Christianity that it insists on 
the combination of faith and intelligence. There 
have been ages or countries where Christians have 
forgotten this — ^where the Christian religion has 
become predominantly emotional on the one hand, 
or predominantly intellectual on the other. But 
these have been its times and places of weakness. 
The true Christianity, the church militant that is 
to become the church triumphant, demands trust in 
God on the one hand, individual intelligence and 
responsibility on the other. This is what Jesus 
preached. This is what Paul preached. This is 
what the great Christian leaders have preached in 
every age. Men have differed in their view of what 
God was ; they have differed as to their conception 
of the kind of responsibility to be placed upon his 
followers ; but they have been at one in preaching 
the power of God and the responsibility of man, the 
duty of faith on the one hand and the privileges 
of freedom on the other. It is to this glorious 
liberty of the gospel that you are called. You are 
taking its privileges and its burdens. If you have 



90 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

learned the lessons that college has to teach, you 
appreciate the burdens no less than the privileges, 
and value the great things of life all the higher 
because you must do battle to maintain them. God 
grant that as the later roll calls come, ten or twenty 
or fifty years afterward, each man, living or dying, 
may be able to say, ''I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith.'' 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE 

1908 

For whosoever will save his life shall lose it; but whoso- 
ever shall lose his life for my sake and the gospel's, the 
same shall save it. 

Every day and every hour we have to be making 
choices. Sometimes the matter to be decided is one 
Like the choice of a profession, which will affect our 
whole future life, and which demands months of 
careful thought. Sometimes it is a mere trivial 
choice of what we shall eat or drink, what we shall 
say or do for our amusement, which is settled upon 
the instant and then forgotten. 

And yet the difference between the important 
and the unimportant choices is not so great as it 
seems. "We can never tell which decision is funda- 
mental and which is trivial. The choice which has 
been prepared by the thought of months may be 
upset by the events of a single day. The choice 
which was but the affair of a moment may prove 
to have consequences unforeseen and immeasurable, 
which last through our whole life. It is the way in 
which a man decides little things, no less than 
great ones, that indicates what he is really made of. 



92 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCEACY 

Every thinking man must sooner or later get at 
some consistent principle to guide him in these 
decisions. 

This principle we call his philosophy of life. A 
child can perhaps get on without such a philosophy, 
content to decide each question under the con- 
trolling impulse or controlling force of the moment. 
A man cannot — at least not unless he is content to 
remain intellectually and morally a child. He 
cannot act on one principle at one moment and 
another principle at another moment and expect 
anybody else to trust him. He will have no sta- 
bility of character; nay, if we are to define char- 
acter as the habit of doing the same thing under 
different circumstances, he will be destitute of 
character itself. If you know what sort of prin- 
ciples a man is governed by, you can tell approxi- 
mately what to rely upon. If he is good, you can 
have confidence in his honor and integrity. If he 
is bad, you can have confidence in his selfishness. 
If he is neither good nor bad, you cannot have any 
confidence in him at all — ' ' a double-minded man, ' ' 
as the Scripture characterizes him, ^^ unstable in 
all his ways"; and the same Scripture runs, ^'Let 
not that man think that he shall receive anything 
of the Lord." 

That kind of man no one wants to be. The child- 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 93 

ish attempt to decide each question as it arises, 
according to its supposed importance, without 
any general philosophy of conduct, we may dismiss 
as an unworthy solution of life's problem. But 
what more consistent solution can we seek? 

The number of philosophies of life which have 
been devised is, I suppose, as great as the number 
of different varieties of human character. But to 
the civilized man of the present day there are four, 
and I believe only four, of these different philoso- 
phies that appeal strongly : those of the Epicurean, 
the ascetic, the Stoic, and the Christian. Each of 
these four views of life has its devotees. Each 
makes at one time or another its strong claim for 
our adherence. He who would understand his own 
thinking and that of the men about him must see 
what these several philosophies promise. He who 
would make consistent use of his own life must 
make choice between them — and hold to the choice 
once made. 

The Epicurean philosophy of life, which is also 
known by the name of rational egoism, may be 
fairly stated as follows: Man, like every other 
animal, seeks his own happiness. He may think 
that he has a choice between different courses of 
action, and deliberately chooses the one that gives 
him less happiness; but this, says the Epicurean, 



94 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

is a delusion. If I indulge to excess in eating and 
drinking, while you submit yourself to the strict 
regimen of the training table, you may think that 
I choose pleasure and you choose pain; but what 
really happens is that you have learned to prefer 
the higher kind of pleasure of sound physical health 
and successful pursuit of sport to the lower pleas- 
ure of gratification of animal appetite. Therefore, 
says the Epicurean, let us frankly recognize that 
all conduct, and especially all calculated conduct, 
is selfish conduct ; and let us so regulate our choices 
that we prefer the higher pleasures to the lower 
ones. 

This was the argument for the Epicurean philos- 
ophy of life, as stated by the ancients. The modern 
world has developed another, and even more 
specious, set of arguments in its favor. 

A hundred years ago people all over the civilized 
world were suddenly accorded a great degree of 
liberty to follow their own pleasure and consult 
their own interests. Conservative men thought 
that this would result in the destruction of society. 
In point of fact, it resulted in its improvement. 
By giving a man the right to live where he pleased, 
you got a better distribution of population than if 
you compelled each man to live where he was born. 
By encouraging everybody to produce what the 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 95 

public was willing to pay for, you supplied the 
public more fully with things it needed than when 
you compelled everybody to follow his father's 
trade. In these lines and in many others it ap- 
peared that the intelligent effort of each individual 
to better himself resulted in his doing more service 
to the community, instead of less service. The 
modem rational egoist goes so far as to claim that 
the intelligent pursuit of the higher kinds of 
happiness by each individual man not only gives 
the best results for him as an individual, but the 
best results for the community of which he is a 
member; in other words, that rational selfishness 
and rational unselfishness tend to coincide. 

This view of life is widely held — more widely at 
the present day than ever before. Yet as a philoso- 
phy of conduct it has certain faults which may 
wreck the individual, and must certainly wreck 
the nation that adopts it. 

To begin with, it is not true that rational selfish- 
ness and rational unselfishness always tend to coin- 
cide. It is not true that the selfishness of the in- 
dividual will always work out what is best for the 
nation. To a certain point it may; beyond that 
point it emphatically does not. This is no place to 
discuss how far the self-interest of the traders helps 
the consumer, or just where it begins to hurt him 



96 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

more than it helps him. It is sufficient to say that 
in many parts of the social order we have passed 
the bound where calculated selfishness does good, 
and have reached the place where it does harm. 
All our great social problems, from the economic 
problem of monopoly to the moral problem of 
divorce, have their roots in the fact that the calcu- 
lating selfishness of the individual does not make 
for the good of the community. 

Nor does it in any broad sense make for the 
happiness of the individual. Look at the school 
children — or, for the matter of that, at the college 
boys — who have learned to study only the things 
that please them, and see how few of them have 
the power of getting enjoyment out of any kind of 
study at all. Look at the life of the business man 
whose sole attempt is to make all he can pecuniarily 
or socially, and see how seldom he gets anything 
except Dead Sea apples. Look at the families of 
those who have entered into the marriage tie as 
something to be made and unmade for purely selfish 
considerations, and see whether you find, as a rule, 
happy homes. Look even at those who thought they 
could pursue so simple a thing as physical pleasure 
in an intelligent way, and see what is left of their 
nerves after trying the experiment. Neither as a 
nation nor as individuals are we intelligent enough, 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 97 

to put the matter on no higher basis, for a philoso- 
phy of life which should seek to make calculated 
self-interest the guide of our conduct. 

But if a man is not to regulate his life in such a 
way as to make himself happy, what principle or 
philosophy is there left ? 

The most obvious alternative is that of the 
ascetic, the second of the philosophies that I have 
named. 

The ascetic sees the evil of devotion to the ex- 
ternal means of happiness. He therefore goes to 
the extreme of rejecting them. Because business 
is so often unworthily selfish, he condemns the use 
of money. Because marriage vows are often made 
and often broken for such miserable reasons, he 
would withdraw from marriage altogether. Happi- 
ness, he says, if it exists at all, lies within the man's 
mind rather than without it. And even this inter- 
nal happiness is to be attained better by ignor- 
ing it than by pursuing it. Such a man lives by 
preference the life of a hermit ; or if he comes out 
into the world he surrounds himself by badges and 
marks of difference which shall isolate him from 
the community about him. 

I do not believe that this philosophy of life will 
ever appeal to many of those who hear these words. 
It is essentially an Eastern ideal rather than a ^ 



98 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Western one ; and it is perhaps needless to say that 
this philosophy of life, while it has contributed 
something to the greatness of the East, has con- 
tributed yet more directly to its weakness. It may 
almost be described as a philosophy of death rather 
than a philosophy of life. It is a philosophy which 
in its practical effects tends to take out of contact 
with the people's life those very men and those 
very forces which are needed to save that life and 
improve it. 

Far higher claims than the philosophy of the 
ascetic has the philosophy of the Stoic. The two 
are alike in some ways; in others they are totally 
different. The ascetic and the Stoic are alike in 
trying to make a man independent of the mere 
accessories of happiness; but whereas the ascetic 
takes refuge in withdrawal, as far as may be, from 
the affairs and incidents and turmoils of life, the 
Stoic undertakes a nobler task and has a more 
positive program. 

*'We are in the midst of a universe," says the 
Stoic, ''whose purposes we do not fully under- 
stand. But certain things are clear. It is clear 
that the universe has an underlying order; it is 
clear that this order is not arranged with a view to 
our own individual happiness as its primary object. 
There are two ways," says the Stoic, ''of attempt- 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 99 

ing to meet this conflict. Either we can try to 
bring the order of the universe into line with our 
own individual desires, or we can try to bring our 
own individual desires into line with the order of 
the universe. The first is the part of a child — of 
a child who reaches out his hand for the moon and 
cries because he cannot get it. The last is the way 
of a man, who, knowing that he cannot get the 
moon, is content to make the most of the light that 
the moon gives him. The child would avoid pain. 
By so doing he but multiplies his pains and terrors, 
and adds imaginary evils to the real ones. The 
man knows that in the universe as it is at present 
ordered pain is there to be borne ; and he so schools 
himself in all his minor choices that when the day 
of a major choice comes he neither weeps nor 
flinches, but takes what is provided. The child is 
carried away by enthusiasm for the pomps and 
vanities of the world, and forgets all else in the 
pleasure of seeing them. The man knows that there 
will be ten failures for one success, and chooses to 
regard both these prizes and his own pursuit of 
them as part of a plan of the universe which he 
does not fully understand but may find satisfaction 
in working out, whether it lead him as an indi- 
vidual to a throne or to a prison. ' ' 

Such, gentlemen, were the principles of the Stoic 



100 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

philosophy — the noblest product of classical an- 
tiquity. Where does it fail ? 

If you are really able to hold it, I am tempted to 
say that it fails nowhere. But few, very few men 
have been able to hold it, and fewer still have been 
able to impress its lessons upon others. Even 
among the good men of the ancient world there 
were a score of Epicureans to every Stoic. There 
is in the Stoic philosophy as I have indicated it a 
certain element of cold majesty that is almost in- 
human. There are few of us who have our actions 
so under the control of our intellect that we can 
suppress the cries of pain or the promptings of 
rebellion by a contemplation of the order of the 
universe. There are few of us who are brave 
enough to work out our own salvation in philo- 
sophic loneliness. The ideals of Epicurus may not 
have been the highest, but they were at any rate 
ideals that recognized the element of human com- 
panionship. He who has read the last unfinished 
letter of that philosopher from his deathbed, ^ ' This 
is my birthday, at once sad and joyous ; sad for the 
pain of my sickness, but many times more joyous 
on account of the tokens of remembrance that I 
have received from my friends, ' ' sees how the lower 
philosophy, with the element of human love thrown 
in, got nearer home to the ancient world and had 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 101 

more practical inspiration for the human spirit 
than had the highest intellectual philosophy with 
the element of love left out. 

The Christian philosophy is the Stoic philosophy 
with the human element added. ^^ Whosoever shall 
lose his life for my sake and the gospeVs, the same 
shall save it." The underlying conception of the 
relation of man's conduct to God's purposes is the 
same. But the life of a man is recognized as the 
life of a man — as a thing of infinite worth. Where 
the Stoic says, ^^ Learn to bear your burden with 
courage, for it is a part of God's purpose," the 
great author of Christianity says, ^ ' Come unto me, 
all ye that labor and are heavy laden, and I will 
give you rest. ' ' The philosophy of Christ calls for 
no less sacrifices than the philosophy of the Stoic, 
but it calls for them in words which read not like 
a judgment but like an inspiration. Keep as much 
of the Stoic view of life as there is in you. These 
are days when we have far too little of it. These 
are days when that kind of courage is needed as 
never before. But superadd to it the Christian 
appeal to the whole man ; the Christian recognition 
of comradeship, which has enabled the nations of 
the world to work out shoulder to shoulder what 
they never could possibly have achieved as indi- 
viduals in isolation; the Christian conception of 



102 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

personality, where God is revealed in all men as 
brothers together, and most of all in our own elder 
brother Jesus Christ the righteous, who was in all 
points tempted as we are, yet without sin. 

Years ago one of the greatest of Southern orators, 
when asked what was the most moving oration that 
he had ever heard, answered that it came from the 
lips of a blind negro preacher in the woods of Vir- 
ginia, cultivated beyond most of his race, and yet 
living and working quietly among them ; who, after 
describing the crucifixion to his audience in lan- 
guage almost beyond the power of those who did 
not hear him to realize, concluded suddenly, after 
a moment's pause, with the words, ^^ Socrates died 
like a philosopher, Jesus Christ like a God. ' ' 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: Whatever 
you may have learned in this place will be of little 
value, unless it teaches you some consistent attitude 
toward the great problems of life with which every 
man must concern himself, whether he will or no. 
If you go forth without some such philosophy of 
life you go into the world rudderless and chartless. 
This I know that you already realize. Every man 
of you who is worth anything at all must have 
thought of these matters as intimately concerning 
himself. The most that I can hope from these 



CONFLICTING PHILOSOPHIES 103 

few words of mine is that they may give you some 
help toward making clearer things of which you 
have already thought yourselves, and of which you 
are going to think much in the next few years to 
come. Not many of you will choose the philosophy 
of the ascetic. More, but not so many more, will 
seek to find their salvation in some form of Stoi- 
cism. But the great choice lies between Epicurean- 
ism and Christianity. These are the two philoso- 
phies which are today contending with one another 
in close and not unequal strife. Much there is for 
the moment that favors the Epicurean. The great 
extension of the fields of human happiness; the 
positive benefits to the community derived from 
the exercise of commercial self-interest; the down- 
fall of certain beliefs which until a few years ago 
were deemed essential parts of Christianity — all 
these tend to give a philosophy of calculated selfish- 
ness an advantage over the appeal of personal 
devotion. Yet I firmly believe that the selfish 
pursuit of happiness menaces alike the efficiency of 
our individual citizens, the stability of our institu- 
tions, and the power of resistance of our country 
to dangers and calamities ; and that the fate of the 
American people — ^nay, the fate of the whole civil- 
ized world — is bound up with the possibility of 
maintaining amid all these difficulties an essentially 



104 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Christian philosophy of life. God grant that light 
may be given you to see these things in such form 
that as each minor choice arises you may regulate 
your life by the Christian view rather than the 
selfish one ; so that whenever the great day of trial 
comes you may stand forth as leaders for the salva- 
tion of your fellow men. 



THE UNCONSCIOUS AND THE INTANGIBLE 

1908 
Seekest thou great things for thyself? seek them not. 

Life is full of things which are worth having, but 
which we shall never get if we devote our time to 
thinking about them. Happiness is worth having ; 
but the man who spends his days planning how to 
be happy defeats his own end. Public office is 
worth having ; but the man who occupies his life in 
scheming how to get office loses the chance of 
public service which makes that office honorable. 
Culture is worth having — almost infinitely worth 
having ; but the man who sets out to make culture 
his primary object usually ends by being either a 
prig or a sham. Somehow or other, the conscious 
seeking of a good thing, if kept up too long and 
too constantly, interferes with the chance of ob- 
taining it. 

And what is true of the details of life is true of 
our plan of life as a whole. 

Everybody wants to be worth something. Every- 
body at a time like this, beginning a new college 
year, wants to arrange his work in such a way that 
the year will count. A man without ambition is 



106 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

a man without a purpose. The man who would 
follow Jesus Christ is not called to relinquish one 
jot or tittle of his ambitions. It would be a very- 
poor kind of Christianity which should seek to 
take away the crown of human leadership and the 
mainspring of human activity. In those places 
and ages where the church has tried to preach 
humility to the extent of destroying ambition, it 
has most conspicuously failed to do its work. ^' What 
Christianity does is to put a man in the way of 
realizing the right kind of ambitions instead of the 
wrong kind. It warns us against seizing the 
shadow and letting go the substance. It gives us 
a scale of values which helps us to guard against 
mistakes of judgment; and better yet, it furnishes 
us a set of motives and inspirations which will 
enable us to put that scale into effective use. s^ 

A man with whom ambition is the dominant 
motive — a man who, in the language of the text, 
seeks great things for himself — is liable to three 
kinds of mistakes : mistakes of dishonesty, mistakes 
of selfishness, and mistakes of judgment. He may 
arrange his work so as to make the most show, with- 
out regard to the substantial qualities underneath. 
In other words, his life may be insincere. Or he 
may plan to do work which is what it pretends to 
be, but may choose more or less consciously those 



THE INTANGIBLE 107 

actions and those objects which he thinks will make 
for his own interest, and neglect those which benefit 
others only. In other words, his life may be selfish. 
Or, last and most common of all, without being 
either very insincere or very selfish, he may yet 
place his attention on what he regards as the things 
that count — the things whose visible results he can 
see and record — to the exclusion of other things 
equally important or more important, which do not 
leave a record in his own mind or that of his 
associates. 

It is chiefly of this last set of mistakes that I am 
going to speak. We all of us despise from the very 
bottom of our hearts a man who works to make 
a show and neglects the substance underneath. We 
all of us condemn just as strongly, though we may 
not despise him quite as thoroughly, the man whose 
life is based on selfish calculation. On both of 
these points American college sentiment is 
thoroughly healthy. It is one of the greatest merits 
of a college community that it values the charlatan 
least when his advertising signs are biggest, and 
has the least mercy for the selfish schemer when he 
has most obviously got ahead of his fellow men. 
A thousand honest voices are preaching these les- 
sons to us from one week's end to another, more 
strongly and more effectively than can be done 



108 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

from any pulpit. All the traditions of this place 
help you to despise a sham and condemn a self- 
seeker. It is of mistakes of judgment that I have 
to speak today, rather than of mistakes of purpose ; 
mistakes which, though they may ultimately lead 
a man to content himself with showy work or 
selfish work, do not at any rate have their origin 
in love of show or love of self; mistakes which are 
all the harder to avoid because they are so near 
being right at the start. 

There are times when the choice between right 
and wrong is a simple thing; times when there is 
a choice between a hard thing clearly labelled right 
on the one side, and an easy thing clearly labelled 
wrong on the other. These are not as a rule the 
parts of our life with which we have the most 
difficulty. The emergency is so obviously a grave 
one that we summon up our strength to meet it, 
and decide to do right even at great sacrifice. The 
serious trouble for strong men comes from another 
source. It comes in crises which seem less grave, 
where the choice between the good and the bad is 
not so obvious — where, indeed, it is chiefly a ques- 
tion which of two good things is the better. Shall 
I use a translation in such a way as to make a 
recitation which will please the instructor, or shall 
I rely on grammar and dictionary, and produce a 



THE INTANGIBLE 109 

result which will please no authority except my 
own conscience? Shall I play to win a game, for 
which my friends care, by any means that lie within 
the rules, or shall I be guided by a spirit of sport 
which my friends will call quixotic, and lose? 
These are types of questions which confront a man 
not in college only but in every year of his sub- 
sequent life. But they come home with exceptional 
force to the college man, because here for the first 
time is placed upon his shoulders the responsibility 
of deciding a large number of them for himself. 

No hard and fast rules can be given which can 
relieve us of this continuous responsibility. There 
is no general proposition which will determine 
what adventitious aids to study are legitimate and 
what are unfair. No absolute line can be laid down 
within which a man may take advantage of tech- 
nicalities and remain a gentleman. Weak minds 
have eternally tried to take shelter behind such 
rules, and have thereby eternally stamped them- 
selves as weak. Not so Jesus, and not so the true 
followers of Jesus. With them the servitude of 
the law has given place to the glorious liberty of 
the gospel; and that liberty, like every other 
liberty, carries with it the need and the duty of 
exercising independent judgment on every difficult 
moral question that confronts them. 



110 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

But though, no absolute line can be drawn be- 
tween right and wrong acts, certain principles may 
be laid down which will help a man to see which 
way to look for the right. I am going to try to 
indicate some of these principles, in the hope that 
they will help us to distinguish true values from 
false ones ; in the hope that some of us may thereby 
be helped to form the habit of choosing the right in 
cases where the wrong looks specious ; and yet more 
perhaps in the hope that some of you who by 
instinct and sentiment have chosen the right and 
are being discouraged at the result may see how 
some things which look large today will perhaps 
look smaller at the Day of Judgment. 

Our life's activities may be divided into two 
parts, the conscious and unconscious. The former 
are those whose results we see and know and 
measure at the time. The latter are those which 
we see and know very inadequately and measure 
not at all. There is a tendency with all of us to 
overvalue the importance of our conscious acts and 
undervalue the importance of our unconscious ones. 
A great deed of self-sacrifice is something visible 
and tangible. A hundred minor acts of courtesy 
are unnoticed by the man who does them. If he 
is trying to judge his own character he thinks 
chiefly of the instances where he has consciously 



THE INTANGIBLE 111 

sacrificed his own interests in order to do some- 
thing for others. But if the world is judging his 
character it will think less than he does of the 
hundred dollars which he did or did not put into 
the contribution box on Hospital Sunday, and 
more than he does of the hundred times that he left 
his neighbor a dollar richer because he had a habit 
of doing business fairly, or the hundred times that 
he cheated his neighbor out of a dollar by business 
habits to which he in his own mind gives no harsher 
name than shrewdness. The better the world is, 
the surer it is to take these last things into account. 

If there is one moral lesson which the gospel 
iterates and reiterates, it is the importance of 
these unconscious courtesies or discourtesies, these 
unconscious honesties or dishonesties. Our God 
desires mercy and not sacrifice. The cup of cold 
water given in Christ's name is worth more than 
a hundred labored attempts to acquire merit. In 
the Day of Judgment the wicked will be con- 
demned, not for the great sins which they have 
committed, but for the little services which they 
have left unrendered; the righteous will be dis- 
tinguished, not by the great deeds that they have 
remembered, but by the little deeds that they have 
forgotten. 

I said a moment ago that the world tended to get 



112 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

nearer and nearer to this way of looking at things 
as it grew better. We ourselves also tend to get 
nearer to it as, we grow older. 

Every time we undertake a new line of activity 
we are conscious, often most painfully conscious, 
of what we are doing. The child who begins arith- 
metic has to add small numbers laboriously on his 
fingers. The man who begins studying a new 
language is pitifully aware of the awkwardness of 
his first modes of expression ; and the better brains 
he has for other things, the more does the sense of 
awkwardness come home to him as an intellectual 
discomfort. Even in sports and pastimes the right 
way of holding the oar or the club seems at first to 
fatigue the body beyond reason, and converts what 
is intended to be a pleasure into very considerable 
physical and mental pain. 

Now in the early stages, whether of study or of 
play, the most praiseworthy scholar is the one who 
is prepared to undergo the pain. Some, of course, 
have a good deal more of it to endure than others 
before they reach any considerable degree of pro- 
ficiency; but nobody can learn to count straight, 
or talk straight, or hit straight without a good deal 
of conscious and rather disagreeable preliminary 
practice. The foundations for first-rate work are 
consciously and painfully laid; but at the time 



THE INTANGIBLE 113 

that the work itself becomes first-rate the labor and 
the consciousness of pain begin to cease. We praise 
the infant who finds that six and two make eight 
by counting on his fingers; we should not praise 
the bank clerk for having to resort to a similar 
process. We praise the student of a foreign lan- 
guage for being willing to undertake the toilsome 
task of finding out whether a certain verb ought 
to be in the indicative or the subjunctive; we 
should not praise his professor for spending corre- 
sponding toil to secure the same result. The time 
when it is hard to do right is essentially the period 
of preliminary training; the unconscious doing of 
right shows that a man is trained. There is a 
point where the achievement which we previously 
regarded as great becomes little. 

What I ask is, that you should use these maturer 
methods of judgment — take these lessons of ex- 
perience to heart in your philosophy of life as a 
whole. The older we grow the more we realize 
that conscious achievement is worth less than it 
seems to be, and that character is worth more than 
it seems to be. The prize winner does one good 
thing or ten good things that he sees. The man 
of character does a hundred or a thousand good 
things, which he does not see because they have 
become a habit, but which count more and more in 



114 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

proportion as those who are about him become 
better qualified to judge. The honorable man is 
far less conscious of his character as a gentleman 
than the dishonorable man who does honorable 
things half the time; but he stands infinitely 
higher, not only in the sight of God but in the sight 
of his fellow men. The essence of real greatness 
is its unconsciousness. 

Whenever a question comes up as to what we 
should do in a difficult case — when we see a tan- 
gible good or prize to be obtained by one line of 
conduct, and only an intangible sentiment to be 
gratified by another — let us remember that in the 
true scale of values our intangible sentiments of 
honor and cleanness and the instincts that go with 
them represent about all that the community really 
values in us ; and that our overwhelming desire for 
the prize, when it comes in conflict with these in- 
stincts, is chiefly an evidence that we are still 
young. The examination mark is a thing of today; 
It may look pretty large when it becomes a doubt- 
ful question whether you are going to pass or be 
dropped. But by the standards of the Day of 
Judgment it is something quite temporal; while 
the gain or loss of honor is eternal. The question 
whether our friends win or lose any contest, from 
a tennis match to a presidential election, may ap- 



THE INTANGIBLE 115 

pear overwhelmingly important at the moment ; but 
the tennis match looks very small two months 
hence, and within two generations even the presi- 
dential election sinks into comparative insignifi- 
cance. The one thing that grows greater as time 
goes on is the heroic character which men have 
achieved by not seeking great things but simply 
doing the daily duties that lay before them, until, 
without knowing it, they had achieved the power to 
meet any emergency that might arise, however 
great. 

In the chapter heading of the text, penned by the 
translators of the Scripture three hundred years 
ago, we read: '^Baruch being dismayed, Jeremiah 
instructeth and comforteth him." The world is 
full of discouragements for the man of modest 
worth when he sees the successes of his more bril- 
liant and aggressive competitors. He must be, not 
only a prophet, but a man of experience in God's 
ways, in order to view things in right proportion. 
If we then wonder, as all of us do at times, what is 
the use of going on quietly, when so many others 
are doing things that seem to count for more; if 
we wonder whether, after all, marks be not of more 
account than culture, or social prominence more 
than substantial character, or visible achievement 
better than single-minded devotion to duty; let us 



116 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

remember that every movement of history is going 
to make the showy things look smaller and the 
quiet things larger. 

As you come back to your class reunions twenty 
and thirty and forty years afterward, you will see 
two things: first, that the most enthusiastic greet- 
ing of remembrance and good fellowship is divided 
impartially between the men who obtained the 
honors of college life and those who lost them ; and 
second, that of the men thus enthusiastically 
greeted an increasing proportion found great 
things by seeking them not. 



ETHICS OF LEADERSHIP 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPAEED 

1913 

An honorable counsellor, which also waited for the king- 
dom of God. 

It was a joyous crowd that entered Jerusalem on 
Palm Sunday. The fishermen and the laborers who 
had left all to follow the Master saw the triumph 
of their hopes at hand. The multitude were ac- 
claiming Jesus as king; some because they cared 
for the loaves and the fishes, some because they 
wondered at the miracles he had wrought, some 
because they sought in him the leader that should 
free the people from the hated dominion of Rome. 
The chief priests and the Pharisees, who had 
hitherto opposed him, seemed powerless to resist 
the wave of public feeling. Already the disciples 
were parcelling out the promised rewards among 
themselves, and disputing who should sit next the 
royal throne. 

But in the heart of Jesus himself there was no 
feeling of triumph. Too well he knew that the sym- 
bol of his kingdom was to be a crown of thorns. He 
knew the suffering that lay before him ; and, what 
was perhaps harder to bear, he knew that he was 



120 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

alone in that knowledge. He had tried to make his 
disciples see what sort of kingdom he promised 
them, and they had deliberately shut their eyes to 
it. Hardship they had endured, and were ready to 
endure, in the hope of a reward that was before 
them and under the inspiration of a leader whom 
they trusted. "When the promised reward should 
vanish from their sight, and when they were left 
to stand alone without the inspiration of Jesus' 
presence, they would quail before the trial. The 
disciple who had been foremost in his protestations 
of loyalty and readiest to welcome hardship was 
then to show himself most craven of all. 

But the hour that proved the weakness of most 
men proved the strength of one. When those who 
had been closest to Jesus were denying their Master 
or standing afar off from him, Joseph of Ari- 
mathea, an honorable counsellor, which also waited 
for the kingdom of God, went boldly (so the word 
runs) to Pilate and begged the body of Jesus. He 
was of a different sort from most of those who had 
followed Jesus in the days preceding. There were 
not many rich men in that company. Joseph was 
rich. They had little good to say of lawyers. 
Joseph was a lawyer. They had declaimed against 
the righteousness of the Pharisees. Joseph was a 
Pharisee. Yet this one man stood by Jesus when 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPARED 121 

all forsook him, and in one short hour earned an 
immortality of glory. 

Does this mean that Joseph of Arimathea was 
a better man than Peter or John or any of the other 
disciples of Jesus? No. It means that he was 
prepared for the emergency as none of the others 
had been or could be. He knew much which they 
did not know. This knowledge had probably made 
it harder for him to follow Jesus in the time of 
prosperity. It was the very thing which enabled 
him to do so in the day of adversity. 

It is not likely that Joseph ever shared any of the 
false hopes that had buoyed up the minds of so 
many others. The multitude that followed Jesus 
was carried away by its own size and enthusiasm. 
Joseph had studied history, and knew how uiilikely 
it was that the unorganized body which acclaimed 
Jesus' preaching, however numerous and enthusi- 
astic, could overthrow the power of Rome. The 
multitude were dazzled by the miracles. Joseph 
knew how uncertain was the testimony on which 
reports of miracles were based, and how little the 
capacity to work wonders meant for the real re- 
generation of the world. The multitude looked 
forward with joy to a political upheaval, to a holy 
war. Joseph knew how much chance of evil and 
how little chance of good lay in such a prospect. 



122 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

He knew that even if they did succeed in over- 
throwing the power of Rome, the rule of a tumultu- 
ous body of enthusiasts, however well-meaning, was 
worse than the rule of law with all its incidental 
hardships. And he probably knew also that if they 
should overthrow the power of Rome and restore 
a successful Jewish democracy, the Kingdom of 
God in the true sense of the words was not to be 
compassed by these means. The false ideals of the 
disciples regarding God's Kingdom undoubtedly 
repelled him instead of attracting him ; for he had 
studied deeply enough in, the law and in the 
prophets to know how little a change of outward 
symbols would mean for the world's spiritual re- 
generation. But he did not let these difficulties 
blind him to the rightness of Jesus' moral teaching 
and to the lovableness of the things for which Jesus 
stood. He did not let his dissatisfaction with the 
disciples' shortsighted views interfere with his 
faith in the ends which Jesus proposed, nor with 
his attachment to Jesus himself and to the things 
he stood for. 

Among all the followers of Jesus, Joseph prob- 
ably came nearest to understanding what the 
Master's kingdom really signified. When the hope 
of royal splendor vanished it meant much to those 
who had confidently expected such splendors; it 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPARED 123 

meant little to Joseph of Arimathea. When Jesus 
laid down his life on the cross it perplexed and 
dumbfounded those who had expected him to save 
himself by the thunders and lightnings of divine 
intervention; it left Joseph no more deeply per- 
plexed than he was before, since he knew that 
thunders and lightnings were not the means by 
which Jesus' real work could be carried on. Just 
what passed in his mind we do not know. We only 
know that the event which made the path of duty 
dark to others made it light to him. 

Do you remember the passage in the Last Days 
of Pompeii where, when the sun was darkened by 
the clouds of smoke and ashes, the blind girl whom 
Glaucus had befriended was the one person who 
could serve as guide? To her alone, says Bulwer, 
the scene was familiar. When the earth was dark- 
ened from the sixth to the ninth hour it brought no 
unwonted fears or perplexities into Joseph's heart. 
For he had foreseen the darkening of men's hopes, 
of which the outer darkness was but a symbol, and 
had nevertheless kept his faith undimmed. This 
was the reason why he, and he alone, was able to 
stand unafraid in the supreme hour of trial. 

Every great historical crisis calls for men of this 
type. Who was it that brought our nation through 
its darkest hours? Not the enthusiasts who de- 



124 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

claimed against slavery as though its abolition 
might be an easy thing; not the orators who were 
most ready to appeal to popular audiences in the 
North or to defy the South on the floors of Con- 
gress; but the man who, growing up in the midst 
of the contest, saw things as they were. Lincoln 
never refused to face a difficulty. He never shut 
his eyes to facts in order to buoy up his courage 
and that of those who were with him. But Lincoln 
never for a moment lost his belief in the future of 
the country. In the long years which served as 
preparation for his work of president, he had 
learned by facing circumstance straightforwardly 
to hold his faith independent of circumstance. This 
was what gave him a power that was denied to 
Seward or Chase or Sumner or Phillips. They had 
been buoying up their faith by illusions which they 
had helped to create; he had been making a faith 
which could stand alone. Such was the story of 
Lincoln; such, with but slight differences, was the 
story of Cavour and Washington and William the 
Silent, and all the men who in the face of apparent 
impossibility have built up nations that lasted. 
Such must any man be who would do his full work 
as a leader. 

Never was the need for this kind of courageous 
thought greater than it is today. We live in an age 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPARED 125 

of reform movements. There is on all hands a zeal 
for the kingdom of God such as recent generations 
have not witnessed. The hope of lifting humanity 
to a higher level appears to have taken hold on a 
larger section of mankind than it ever did before. 
The ranks of the reformers are recruited from as 
many different elements as were the ranks of the 
disciples of Jesus. Some are moved by selfish 
hope of personal advancement; some by mere love 
of excitement; some care so much for the broad 
objects which they have in view that they lose sight 
of all besides. Surrounded as he is by disciples of 
this kind, the work of the true reformer is mis- 
understood both by his friends and by his enemies 
— sometimes, I am sorry to say, even by himself. 

The effect of college training is to make us criti- 
cal of heterogeneous movements of this kind. Our 
political economy teaches us that measures which 
are intended to make everybody rich often result in 
making everybody poor. Our history teaches us 
that the hope of elevating humanity by acts of the 
legislature is apt to prove illusory. Our science, 
physical as well as political, teaches us to look 
askance at all attempts to produce radical improve- 
ments in the social organism by mere changes in 
the machinery of government. 

It rests with us to determine whether this sort of 



126 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

knowledge is going to make us better men or worse 
men. If we use our knowledge as the great body of 
the Pharisees used their knowledge it will make us 
worse. They saw the good that there was in Jesus' 
teaching. Many of them sympathized with the 
things that he said. Some of them felt themselves 
the better for his preaching and wished to hear 
more of it. But for one reason or another they 
found it hard to associate with him. He outraged 
conventions which they regarded as useful. He 
attracted elements which they thought dangerous 
to society. The ends that he had in view could not 
be attained by the means that his followers pro- 
posed. As a result of all these things interest gave 
place to indifference, and indifference to open hos- 
tility. The thinking men of the community, the 
men who should have been on the side of Jesus, 
lost sight of the great lessons which he had to teach 
to them and the world, because they could not take 
their minds from the dangers and difficulties and 
impossibilities by which his enterprise was sur- 
rounded. Under such circumstances the Pharisees' 
knowledge was worse than useless. Better far that 
they should have had the unintelligent zeal of the 
disciples, who went blindly into a righteous cause, 
than that they should lose the chance for faith be- 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPARED 127 

cause they saw the difficulties into which faith 
would lead them. 

But, thank God ! there is another alternative open 
to us. Instead of letting our knowledge crowd out 
our faith we may do as Joseph did, and add one to 
the other. He saw as clearly as any of his fellow 
Pharisees the illusions under which the disciples 
labored. But he did not let this kill his love for 
the Master or his faith in the great things for which 
Jesus stood. His knowledge made his task a much 
harder one than that of his fellow disciples. It is 
easy to endure privations in order to attain an 
earthly kingdom. It is hard to endure privations 
for a kingdom which is not of this earth and for 
a cause whose very success may be mistaken by the 
world for failure. It is easy to fall in with the 
ways of the chanting crowd. It is hard to work 
out one's own salvation with fear and trembling. 
Yet this was what Joseph did. For years he had 
been getting ready for the crisis, even as we in our 
several places can get ready. We have no record 
of his thoughts during these years of preparation. 
They must have been years of discouragement, of 
uncertainty, of misunderstanding. But they made 
him the man he was. When the time came he was 
prepared; prepared because he had wrought out 



128 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

a faith of his own independent of the illusions of 
those about him. 

''And the Sabbath drew on" — ^not Palm Sunday 
this time, but Easter Sunday. Gone forever, in one 
short week, was the hope of that earthly kingdom 
which the multitude had desired and which the 
priests and the governors had feared. The King- 
dom of God for which Joseph had waited was at 
hand. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: God offers 
the educated man a burden and a privilege. His 
burden is to hold his faith in the day of its pros- 
perity, unsupported by the illusions of the crowd 
and undaunted by its errors. His privilege is to 
hold his same faith in the night of its adversity, 
when illusions have vanished and the courage that 
depended on them is dead and the crowd shrinks 
from the penalties which the errors of the day have 
brought in their train. "We cannot always publicly 
proclaim our faith in a righteous cause when it is 
being misused by false friends; but we can keep 
that faith alive in our hearts, and be ready to avow 
it to the world when false friends have dropped 
away and it needs true ones. I trust that it may be 
said of each one of us when the final account of 
his deeds is made, *'He never lost his belief in 



THE MAN WHO WAS PREPARED 129 

righteousness because the errors of its advocates 
made it popular; but he gained new courage to 
publish that belief when the exposure of those 
errors made it unpopular. ' ' For unto you, gentle- 
men, it is given to know the mysteries of the 
kingdom of God. 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 
1919 

The measure of the stature of the fulness of Christ. 

Every college contains two groups of students: 
one composed of men who are content to perform 
a set task required of them as candidates for a 
degree, another consisting of men who put their 
heart into their work, and strive to do all they can. 
The English universities frankly recognize this 
separation into groups, and classify their graduates 
as ^^pass men" or *^ honor men.'' 

This difference of mental attitude shows itself 
in other things besides study. A man can face his 
life problems in either of these two ways. As we 
come to the end of our college course, we may well 
ask ourselves whether we are entering upon our 
career in the world which is before us as pass men 
or as honor men. Are we content to do what 
society requires, or do we intend to show the best 
that is in us in order to qualify as leaders ? 

In our professional ambitions I believe that 
every one of us is at heart an honor man. We do 
not go into the study of law with the idea of learn- 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 131 

ing just enough to enable us to gain admission to 
the bar and to carry on a routine practice without 
conspicuous mistakes. We want to fit ourselves for 
eminence in the profession, and we are content to 
face the difficulties and risks that go with the pur- 
suit of eminence. We do not go into business to 
learn the routine of commerce and accounting. We 
aim to qualify ourselves for working on just as 
large a scale as possible and achieving the kind of 
success which the world recognizes and rewards. 
In science we wish to be discoverers ; in politics we 
wish to be leaders. The career that attracts us is 
not that which is won by observance of routine, but 
by the development of individual power. 

But are we equally ambitious regarding our 
own Christian character? In this all-important 
field are we content to be pass men, or do we desire 
to be honor men ? Is it enough for us to maintain 
our standing as respectable members of society, or 
shall we develop ourselves to the point where we 
become leaders? To this question there can be 
but one answer. The Christian who is content with 
mere observance of routine is no Christian at all. 
If there is one lesson brought home to the minds of 
men by the epistles of St. Paul and to their hearts 
by the gospel of the Lord Jesus Christ, it is the 
duty of religious leadership and religious initia- 



132 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

tive. Not to obey a law, but to do better than the 
law requires ; not to follow in paths set by others, 
but to mark out the very best path we can, — this is 
true religion; this is the essence of Christian 
doctrine. 

How can we best realize this ideal in our own 
life? "What distinctive things has the world the 
right to expect of us as the result of our last three 
or four years of experience — diversified as this 
has been for most of us by the privilege of serving 
our country in a great national crisis? How can 
we use the lessons of our college career to help us 
to become Christian leaders? 

Three qualities mark the leader whom others can 
safely follow : sense of proportion, personality, and 
self-forgetfulness. 

Sense of proportion is not only one of the most 
useful human qualities, but one of the rarest. Few 
men instinctively see things in their real size or 
value things by their real measure. People look at 
the foreground and forget the background. A 
tree a few feet away blots out miles of distant land- 
scape. Just for that reason leadership must be en- 
trusted to the man who does not let the distant 
landscape be blotted out ; who appreciates that the 
tree which looks large from where we stand today 
may look very small from where we stand 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 133 

tomorrow. If we are anxious to qualify as leaders, 
we must understand and emphasize permanent 
values as distinct from momentary values. 

Part of this power is temperamental — something 
that a man has from his birth. Part — and I believe 
a much larger part — is something which can be 
learned and which the lessons of our college course 
should assist us to learn. 

To get human events in their relative size we 
need to look at them from a distance; and our 
college studies help us to this end. History may be 
defined as the science of observing human conduct 
at a distance — of watching the behavior of men in 
other nations and other times under conditions 
where we can see which of the things that looked 
large at the time were really large and which were 
simply prominent. The man who takes the lessons 
of history to heart has an advantage, not only in 
judging the politics of his own nation, but in judg- 
ing his own conduct and that of those about him. 
Nor is it by historical studies alone that we can 
help ourselves to make true estimates of the real 
size of things. The man who reads masterpieces of 
poetry and prose which have stood the test of time 
gets a habit of judgment of literary values which 
is denied to him who only reads the novels of the 
day. The habit of fixing our vision and our inter- 



134 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

est on things which have looked great to successive 
generations of men, instead of appealing to the 
momentary interest of a single decade or a single 
year, gives a student of letters or art an instinct 
for what is permanent. This is the true justifica- 
tion of classical study. Men who have the instinct 
for what is permanent become thereby better 
judges, not of art and letters only, but of historical 
and moral values. 

We can also learn to look at facts without preju- 
dice. The man who has studied law can make his 
knowledge of evidence just as valuable a help in his 
own personal character as in his professional prac- 
tice. The man who has studied science can find the 
habit of making measurements instead of making 
guesses, and of applying general rules rigidly in- 
stead of treating individual cases at haphazard, 
just as important for his work as a man as it is 
for his work as an expert. Everything that con- 
duces to objectivity in our thinking can be made 
to contribute to that right sense of values which is 
at once so useful and so rare. 

We may also learn from our college experience 
to look at things in as many cross lights as possible. 
During the last three or four years we have had 
the chance to compare impressions with men who 
were studying the same things that we were and 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 135 

interested in the same things, but who looked at 
them from different angles of vision — men of dif- 
ferent antecedents, different prejudices, different 
habits of weighing evidence. From such a com- 
parison, if honestly made, comes a salutary cor- 
rection of our standards of value. The man who 
looks at events from one point only sees them flat. 
The man who looks at them from several stand- 
points sees them solid. He gets their depth as well 
as their surface. It is in this respect that humor 
is an immensely powerful help to the Christian 
leader; for humor is in its very essence an unex- 
pected sidelight thrown upon a familiar picture, 
which reveals the depth as well as the surface. 

It was this sense of the real size of things and this 
power of looking below the surface that marked 
out Paul among the other apostles. It was this, we 
may say in all reverence, that distinguished Jesus 
from the long line of prophets that preceded him. 
Earnestness the others had; desperate earnestness, 
that made them welcome martyrdom — a zeal for 
God, but not according to knowledge. The ques- 
tion whether the knowledge was there as well as 
the earnestness was what determined their actual 
power of leadership. It is a Christian duty to know 
things. Let us not delude ourselves into making 
the conventional distinction between intellectual 



136 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

and moral qualities. The man who is content to 
make zeal an excuse for mis judgment, or to try to 
enter heaven on an imperfect record of perform- 
ance because he didn't know any better, is by that 
very act forfeiting all claim to leadership in the 
things of life that are most essential. 

But knowledge, though a vitally important ele- 
ment in leadership, is not everything. A man must 
have personal qualities that will so influence and 
inspire others as to make his knowledge count. The 
crowd sees the maple tree in the foreground. The 
man who insists on the landscape behind is almost 
always in a minority. For him to feel sure of his 
standards and ideals under such conditions requires 
courage. To maintain them until others begin to 
see that they are right requires stability. It is this 
sort of courageous stability that we dignify by the 
name of character. Character has been defined as 
the habit of doing the same thing under different 
circumstances. There is no higher praise that can 
be given to a good man than to say that you know 
where to find him. He is a man who not only sees 
what is distant, but shapes his course by what is 
distant, and by so doing makes himself a safe guide 
for others to follow. They may not see it at first, 
but they will find it out before long. 

In the four years of our life here we have wit- 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 137 

nessed a gradual sifting out of men. In Freshman 
year the leaders to whom we naturally turned were 
those who were brilliant or attractive. Time alone 
showed whether these men were strong or weak of 
purpose. If they were weak their influence was 
transient. The more brilliant or attractive they 
had been at the outset, the stronger was the reaction 
against them when their steadiness of character 
was found deficient. In the long run the thing that 
made a man's personality count was the quality of 
courage and stability ; the fact that we knew where 
to find him. And as class reunions come, and we 
meet again here ten or twenty or thirty years 
hence, the decisive importance of this element of 
personality in making knowledge count and giving 
a man the position of leadership which he has the 
capacity to fill will become manifest with ever 
increasing force. 

And there is yet a third element in Christian 
leadership besides sense of values and personality, 
and that is self-forgetfulness. Unselfish knowl- 
edge and unconscious force of character count for 
many times more than that which is self-centered 
or self-conscious. This is by no means an easy 
lesson. I think every man of strong character must 
repeat in his own life the story of Christ's temp- 
tation in the wilderness, and must learn to put 



138 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

behind him the show of success as a condition of 
obtaining the reality. 

How is this self-forgetfuhiess achieved, and how 
can we use the experiences of college life to help 
US in compassing it? 

No man ever learns to forget himself by a con- 
scious act of forgetting. He does it by doing 
things for other people, which absorb his thoughts 
until they become fixed, as by instinct, on some- 
thing outside of himself. "What thing that shall be 
depends largely upon his own personal character- 
istics. If he is a man of strong affections he 
achieves self -f orgetf ulness through sympathy ; 
entering into the thoughts and feelings of those 
about him until their happiness becomes his un- 
conscious goal and drives considerations of his own 
personal profit out of account. If he is a man of 
political instinct, an organizer and leader of men, 
he achieves self-f orgetfulness through contact with 
public sentiment. He rejoices in becoming part of 
collective movements of feeling and opinion, which 
he dominates more and more surely as he sinks his 
own personality in the general zeal for the public 
good. If he has the temperament of the scholar 
and investigator he achieves self-forgetfulness 
through idealism. HTe comes to care so much for 
the truth that his personal affairs and interests are 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 139 

forgotten in the face of the eternal verities as he 
sees them. For him is realized in a very profound 
sense the scriptural promise, '^Te shall know the 
truth, and the truth shall make you free. ' ' By one 
or the other of these routes the world's great leaders 
have reached a measure of self-forgetfulness which 
enabled them to add to their sense of values and 
their force of personality the confidence and the life 
which is given to him who has lost himself in the 
thought of something larger and higher and more 
enduring. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class : The world is 
today craving moral and spiritual leadership more 
intensely than ever before. The war has brought 
the peoples of the earth face to face with the 
realities of life. Five years ago some men wor- 
shipped pleasure; others worshipped money; still 
others worshipped force. The war has called a 
sudden halt in the pursuit of pleasure. It has 
shown the precariousness of money and the things 
which money represents. It has in these last few 
months brought home the lesson that the blind 
worship of force defeats its own end. Men are 
looking for a better God than any of these. 

They do not readily find the object of their 
search. The old religious forms which satisfied 



140 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

the peoples of Europe a hundred years ago or fifty 
years ago no longer meet the needs of the day. 
The growth of popular science, with its mixture of 
truth and error, has shaken the hold of creeds. 
The growth of democracy, in thought and feeling 
as well as in public affairs, has made people im- 
patient of authority and its symbols. They seek 
leaders who shall reveal God to them in terms that 
they can understand; leaders who know modern 
science and modem politics, but who have at the 
same time an instinct for spiritual truth, and a 
personality and self-forgetfulness which will carry 
others with them. 

Exactly what form the religion and the Chris- 
tianity of the future will take, no man living can 
tell. It remains to be revealed, and to be revealed 
through men. Christianity was never in its essence 
a set of creeds or a set of forms, though one age 
after another has tried to make it so. It was a 
continuation of the personal influence of Jesus 
Christ in the lives of people who had heard of him 
and wanted to be like him. Forms change from 
generation to generation. The creed that was use- 
ful as a rallying cry one day becomes an outworn 
formula the next. But the influence of God as 
revealed through the man Jesus Christ remains. In 
proportion as we share his spirit, we have it in our 



FITNESS FOR COMMAND 141 

power to exercise the same kind of influence ; to be 
ourselves, in our own sphere, revelations of God to 
men. He who sees farther than others can give the 
world vision; he who stands steadier than others 
can give it character; he who forgets himself in 
doing things for others can give it religion. May- 
it be ours thus to become children of God; and if 
children, then heirs; heirs of God, and joint heirs 
with Christ, to an eternal inheritance ! 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 

1912 

He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and 
he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city. 

On an afternoon in April, 1862, a Northern general 
saw his beaten army forced back step by step 
toward the Tennessee River, which apparently cut 
off all hope of further retreat. Of forty thousand" 
men that had gone into action under him that 
morning, scarce a quarter remained in line. Ten 
thousand were killed, wounded, or prisoners; 
twenty thousand more had broken from their places 
at the front and were helpless to resist the enemy's 
victorious advance. ' ' This looks bad, ' ' said one of 
the general's trusted friends at five o'clock on that 
eventful afternoon at Pittsburg Landing. ^'No," 
said the Union commander, as he glanced at his 
watch, ^^they won't quite drive us into the river in 
the two hours of daylight that remain. They have 
put in all their men today ; we shall be reinforced 
in the night, and tomorrow we shall win." And 
they did. 

Somewhat more than a year later a ConfedeTate 
general stood on the ridge opposite Gettysburg, 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 143 

watching the failure of the last effort of his army to 
win a decisive victory on Northern soil. The high 
hopes of the morning had been shattered by the 
events of the afternoon. There was no panic among 
the troops — two years' experience of war had so 
trained the soldiers of both North and South that 
they were hardly less steadfast in defeat than in 
victory — but there were no reinforcements at hand 
and no ammunition left to fight another battle. 
Nothing remained but long and perilous retreat 
through a hostile country. "Wrung as his heart 
was with anguish, the Confederate general yet up- 
held the spirit of his army by his unfaltering reso- 
lution and unchanged, nay, even heightened, cour- 
tesy of demeanor. To those under him he gave 
praise. Whatever blame there was he took to 
himself. Never did the gallant gentleman who for 
three years led the army of Northern Virginia 
show himself more a gentleman than on that dis- 
astrous July day when he saw the failure of a 
battle and foresaw the failure of a cause. 

I have chosen these two instances from the lives 
of the two great leaders on opposite sides. Grant 
and Lee, because they show the essential reason why 
those men were leaders. The North had generals 
whose mere intellectual power of planning battles 
was better than Grant's. The South had generals 



144 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

whose intellectual power, taken in this same narrow 
sense, was just as good as Lee's. The quality that 
lifted these men above their fellows, and gave them 
the loyal confidence of the soldiers under them and 
the people behind them, was a moral one. Both 
were calm men, not unduly exalted by victory nor 
unduly depressed by defeat — men who could 
moderate the excitement of those under them when 
there was danger of rashness, or rouse the courage 
and endurance of their followers when there was 
danger of f aintness. That was why men loved and 
trusted them during their lives; that is why men 
venerate their memory after they are gone. 

It is moral quality of this same sort that is 
needed to make a man a leader anywhere and in 
any department of life, to make people love him 
and trust him and follow him. Life is not a game 
of chess which is won by him who can make the 
best calculations. Now and then a man like Alex- 
ander or Napoleon possesses such transcendent 
intellectual powers that he can treat life as if it 
were a game, and can dispose of nations and armies 
as though they were mere castles or pawns on his 
chess board. But neither a Napoleon nor an Alex- 
ander was able to leave an enduring empire. The 
men whose work has" lasted best are those like 
Lincoln and Washington, like Cromwell and "Wil- 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 145 

liam the Silent; men differing greatly in intel- 
lectual gifts, yet marked out above all others by 
the habit of self-command. Go back through the 
list of Christian heroes and martyrs, back to Paul, 
back to Jesus himself, and we find that the thing 
that counted most in their character and their work 
was that they had risen above the distractions of 
success and failure into a command of their own 
souls, and that this gave them command over the 
deeds and the souls of others. 

We are here to train ourselves for leadership in 
our several callings. How shall we attain the kind 
of power that these men possessed, and lead the 
world to trust us according to our several abilities 
in the same kind of way that it trusted them? 

The first thing for us to do is to get a sense of the 
relative value of different objects; to get them 
into their right size and into right proportion to 
one another. This is the intellectual basis of leader- 
ship. Most of the excitement which upsets men's 
nerves is due to the overvaluation of something 
that comes into prominence at the moment, so that 
we lose sight of the greater things that are behind 
and beyond. Here is a little child wildly wrought 
up by a squabble with his playmates. There is 
some toy, some privilege, some .honor, which he 
thinks ought to come to him. He is ready to stop 



146 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

the games of all the other children — he would stop 
the business of the whole city itself if he could — in 
order that five minutes' possession of that toy might 
be rightly adjusted. The grown-up world con- 
demns such ways as childish. But only a very 
small proportion of the grown-up world has learned 
to avoid this same sort of mistake, when it comes to 
a struggle for the kind of titles and privileges and 
toys that constitute the playthings of grown men. 
Each in his own sphere is ready to stop the game 
or break its rules in order to scramble for the re- 
ward. To one who looks on from outside the whole 
matter seems like puerile folly. But if a man is 
himself engaged in the struggle, he needs an un- 
commonly clear head to see things in their right 
size. The average man, through sheer lack of 
brains, thinks that he proves his right to lead when 
he is really proving his unfitness to lead, because he 
has no just sense of the ends that are best worth 
pursuing. 

But there is another quality of leadership, and 
a more important one. It is not enough for us to 
get things in their right proportion to one another. 
We must keep them in right proportion to our 
own selves and our own souls. To the brain that 
apprehends things as^they are must be added the 
spirit that will deem no provocation or excuse 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 147 

sufficient to justify the loss of its temper, its nerve, 
or its honor. 

"Why do we distrust a man who loses his temper ? 
Partly because we suspect that he will say and do 
unwise things under excitement; but still more 
because in the very act of losing his temper he is 
putting a low value on himself and his soul. No 
man, however strong he is, can always dominate 
circumstances; but he can always prevent circum- 
stances from dominating him. It is a hard lesson 
to learn, and one which cannot be too often re- 
peated, that the man who loses his temper under 
any provocation whatsoever puts himself down for 
the moment as being of less value and less impor- 
tance than the thing which calls out his excitement. 
Be assured that the world will not rate him higher 
than he rates himself. Of course there are differ- 
ent degrees of provocation. The man who scolds 
and storms over a little thing is smaller than the 
one who loses control of himself in righteous indig- 
nation over a great one ; but the real leader is the 
one who has learned to rise superior to the great 
provocation as well as to the small. 

The man who loses his temper lowers himself for 
the moment. More permanent is the evil to the 
man who goes one step further, and loses his nerve 
■ — who allows himself to be unduly excited by 



148 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

success or unduly depressed by failure. Not for an 
instant only, but for hours and for days, does he 
confess himself unequal to the situation. Here 
again there are differences of provocation. The 
greater the prize for which we play, the harder it 
is to bear success with modesty or failure with 
constancy. By successes and failures of different 
sizes men are constantly being tested and the meas- 
ure which they place upon themselves is being 
taken. Be assured that here again the world will 
not rate us higher than we rate ourselves. 

But there is yet another act of self-abasement 
which cuts deeper and lasts longer than losing one 's 
temper or losing one 's nerve. A man may so over- 
estimate the importance of an end to be attained, 
and so underestimate the value of his own soul, 
that he will be willing to purchase success at the 
price of honor. A man may cheat in an examina- 
tion in order to secure his degree. This means, in 
plain English, that he deems his honor in a matter 
like this of less value than a piece of parchment. 
A man may break the rules when the umpire is not 
looking, in order to win a contest. Whenever he 
does so he is saying to the world that he deems 
himself of less value than a game. Here also there 
are many different liegrees of provocation and 
many different kinds of excuse. But the world is 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 149 

not looking for men who can make plausible ex- 
cuses; it is looking for men who do not have to 
make excuses at all. 

Our college life gives us daily opportunities for 
training in this quality of moral leadership. The 
student, above all other men, has the chance to 
learn the relative value of different objects and to 
measure his power of keeping his temper, his nerve, 
and his honor, amid the temptations offered by 
things small and things large. 

The boy who goes directly from the high school 
into the factory or the office necessarily works in a 
somewhat narrow horizon. The daily duty looms 
up large before him and crowds other duties out 
of sight. The professional standard of success 
occupies so large a place in his world that he finds 
it hard to get a wider outlook and attain wider 
ideals of conduct. But the boy who comes to college 
studies different kinds of things and meets different 
kinds of men and is brought in contact with differ- 
ent kinds of interests. He is taught to judge of the 
politics of the day by the larger standards of his- 
tory. He learns to judge the petty aims and ideals 
of people about him in the light of the larger ideals 
of philosophy and of poetry. He accustoms him- 
self to appeal from the narrow teachings of every- 
day experience to the broader standards of scien- 



150 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

tific truth. Best of all, in Yale and in the majority 
of our American colleges, he is brought into a 
Christian atmosphere ; an atmosphere charged with 
the spirit of reverence and of service. 

He is also given large opportunities by which to 
measure himself and his own moral capacity. The 
college is full of all kinds of things worth doing, 
all kinds of prizes worth striving for, all kinds of 
social distinctions and ambitions. It is the custom 
in some quarters to decry the importance of these 
prizes of college life ; to say that the study and the 
play of a place like this count for little in com- 
parison with the study and play of the world about 
us ; to urge the student to seek culture for culture 's 
sake and sport for sport's sake, rather than enter 
into the keen competition of the examination hall 
or the athletic field. "With this view I cannot con- 
cur. The prizes of college are worth winning. The 
man who can win them honorably proves his quality 
of leadership. But just because they are worth 
winning they put a man's temper and a man's 
nerve and a man's very honor to the trial. The 
true man is the one that can really care for the 
game and not succumb to its temptations. He that 
can meet opposition without loss of temper, failure 
without discouragement, unfairness without swerv- 
ing from his own strict code of honor, has proved 



THE PRICE OF GREATNESS 151 

his right to the proud title which the Homeric 
Greeks gave to the greatest of their princes, ^ ' leader 
of men. ' ' He has proved it, not by tasting the joys 
of leadership, but by uncomplainingly bearing its 
pains. 

There is a passage in the Sermon on the Mount 
which for many years seemed to me strange: 
** Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the 
earth." If Christ had said that they should see 
God, like the pure in heart, if he had said that they 
should be called the children of God, like the peace- 
makers, it would all have seemed intelligible and 
natural enough. But what has meekness to do 
with inheriting the earth ? Look back into the lives 
of the men that I have named. Grant and Lee, 
Lincoln and Washington, William and Cromwell, 
Paul and Jesus, and we shall see what it means. 
They inherited what others could not receive, be- 
cause they had raised themselves above the petti- 
ness of self-assertion into the larger atmosphere of 
self-devotion; because they were ready to forego 
and renounce and suffer if need be, in order that 
the thing worth doing might be done. 

*^ Wherefore seeing we are compassed about with 
so great a cloud of witnesses, let us lay aside every 
weight, and the sin which doth so easily beset us, 
and let us run with patience the race that is set 



152 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

before us, looking unto Jesus the author and 
finisher of our faith; who for the joy that was set 
before him endured the cross, despising the shame, 
and is set down at the right hand of the throne 
of God/' 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD OF SUCCESS 

1914 

Covet earnestly the best gifts ; and yet shew I unto you a 
more excellent way. 

Better and more fully than any other apostle, Paul 
of Tarsus appreciated the importance of profes- 
sional ambition and professional success. 

He knew what it means to each of us personally. 
He was himself a college man, a lawyer, a trusted 
councillor of his nation. He had felt the joy of 
struggling for life's prizes and grasping some of 
the best of them. He understood how much of 
each man's highest self is brought out by the 
struggle and gratified by the reward. 

He knew what it means to the world as well as 
to the individual. He knew the importance of 
having the strongest man put in the place of most 
authority. He was no leveller, like so many of his 
fellow disciples. He did not occupy himself with 
equal division of lands and goods. He had no 
patience with those who tried to let inspiration take 
the place of knowledge and allow the momentary 
enthusiasm of the ignorant to decide things that 
should be left to the sober judgment of the expert. 



154 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Society was then, as it is now, an exceedingly com- 
plex piece of mechanism, in which the different 
parts must be fitted to do their several offices and 
left free to perform their several duties. This 
could only be accomplished when men competed 
eagerly for success in their several callings and 
were allowed to reap the fruits of that competition. 

He knew what it means to the church of Christ 
and to the advancement of the kingdom of God on 
earth. The work that Paul himself was able to do 
in building up that church and advancing that 
kingdom was itself in large measure the result of 
his own professional experience. The Christian 
church as Paul found it was a small group of 
zealots, animated by high ideals but narrowly re- 
stricted in their influence. The Christian church 
as Paul left it was an organized body, extending 
through a large part of the civilized world and with 
a wide and increasing power to transform human 
institutions. It was Paul's professional grasp of 
affairs which enabled him to work this change; to 
make the spiritual truths of Christianity not only 
a comfort to the sorrowing and a sustaining power 
to the martyr, but an intellectual and moral force 
in organized society. ^ 

But having known all these things and done all 
these things, he was able to say to the men of 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD 155 

Corinth, * ^ Prof essional ambition is not the whole 
of life nor the best thing in it. It is good for our 
work in the world and for our service in the church. 
But it is essential that every Christian should be 
larger than his profession, and the gospel of Jesus 
Christ can make him so.'^ This was Paul's doc- 
trine. I wish this morning to show how that doc- 
trine applies to some of the problems that lie before 
us in the immediate future. 

For the first few years after a man leaves college 
a large part of his thought and effort is almost 
necessarily centered upon professional success, 
whether he will or no. The problem of making a 
living is a serious one. The man who can first 
acquire the knowledge and the habits that will 
enable him to solve that problem has secured the 
necessary start in the race of life. The world has 
few pleasures comparable in intensity to those first 
professional achievements which show a man that 
he has secured his foothold and can count himself 
as being fairly on the road to independence. Small 
wonder that many a man is tempted to forget that 
there is any other race except the race for pro- 
fessional success; any other road worth travelling 
except the road to power on these lines. 

But the man who makes this mistake usually 
pays the penalty. A large number can get a fair 



156 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

start ; but the prizes are small in number, and nine 
men out of ten who set their hearts on obtaining 
these prizes are disappointed. There are many- 
lawyers who can do honorable service to the coun- 
try ; thef e are few who can attain actual eminence 
at the bench or bar. There are many physicians 
who can minister to the wants of the sick ; there are 
few who achieve national reputation as pioneers in 
science or in surgery. There are many men who 
make an honorable living in manufactures and 
commerce ; there are few who can arouse the envy 
of their fellow citizens by the magnitude of their 
accumulations. But the man who has allowed 
professional ambition so to absorb his soul and 
so to dominate his spirit that he has no heart for 
anything else will count himself a failure unless 
his name is among these few. Many a man of fifty 
whom the world counts successful is in his heart 
soured and disappointed — unnecessarily soured 
and disappointed — because at the age of thirty he 
shut his eyes to the other kinds of success which 
life had to offer besides professional distinction. 

And even if a man attains high distinction and 
finds his name enrolled among the prize winners, 
he is not exempt from peril of failure. The value 
of the professional success is not due to the money 
that it enables a man to earn or to the distinction 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD 157 

which it confers upon his name; it is due to the 
public approval which success carries with it. But 
the things which the public approves in one genera- 
tion are not always the same which command re- 
spect and admiration in the next. A century ago 
the most successful minister was he who was 
mightiest with the weapons of theological con- 
troversy. Today the controversialist is looked upon 
as a survival from archaic times. A generation ago 
the most successful lawyer was he who could best 
advise his clients how to take advantage of tech- 
nicalities to defeat the purposes of the law while 
complying with its forms. Today the lawyers who 
have given such advice are being condemned by the 
world of business and of politics. Examples like 
these might be adduced from every profession. He 
who at the age of thirty fixes his mind primarily 
on the chance of getting the most money or the 
most fame in his own particular branch of work is 
almost certain to fix his eyes so exclusively upon 
the rules of the game that he is playing that he 
fails to note the changes in the standards and the 
demands of the larger world. When the prize is 
in his grasp it turns to Dead Sea fruits — eminence 
in a branch of knowledge for which the world has 
ceased to care; success in a line of pursuits that 
the world no longer approves; money made by 



158 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

means that the world has learned to condemn and 
whose possession is therefore no title to public con- 
sideration. The man who has centered all his hopes 
of success in the race for professional distinction 
has entered upon a career where the peril of the 
winner is scarcely less than the peril to the loser. 

An illustration from college life will serve to 
make this point clear. 

During the years that we have spent at Yale we 
have been engaged in competitions in studies or in 
writing, in college organization or in college ath- 
letics, which are essentially like the struggles for 
professional eminence that we shall meet in the 
world outside. We congratulate unreservedly the 
man who has achieved honorable success in these 
competitions. We condemn almost as unreservedly 
the man who has studied for marks or played for 
a record, even if he has not been guilty of actual 
unfairness. This distinction is a thoroughly sound 
and right one. The habit of making it is one of 
the most useful lessons — I might add, one of the 
most essentially Christian lessons — that a man 
learns from his course here. For all these college 
competitions are essentially tests of fitness for 
leadership. We approve the man who does best in 
Latin or mathematics, not because of the value of 
the Latin or mathematics that he learns but because 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD 159 

the winner of the competition has proved his power 
to serve society by dealing with facts and evidence 
of certain kinds. We pay homage to the News 
chairman or the football captain, not because of the 
literary merits of the Yale News or the physical 
importance of football as a form of healthful exer- 
cise, but because the men who have fairly won their 
way to these positions have proved their qualities 
of organization and command. "We recognize that 
the winning of a college competition is not an end 
but a means. If a man tries to make it an end 
instead of a means, we discourage him. If he per- 
sists in so doing, we condemn him. 

"What holds true in the college contests through 
which we have just been passing ought to hold true 
of the contests in the larger world which we are 
about to undertake. Life's prize competitions are 
not ends in themselves. They are means of proving 
our worth as men ; of bringing out what is best in 
US; of enabling us to determine, and of enabling 
the world to determine, the positions of leadership 
and responsibility for which we are fitted. A 
man's success or failure in life is not measured by 
his success or failure in winning the race. It is 
measured by his success or failure in accepting the 
responsibilities of the position for which he has 
proved his fitness. This is Paul 's doctrine through 



160 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

and through. ' ' Covet earnestly the best gifts, ' ' he 
says. Let every man pitch his professional ambi- 
tions high and try to qualify for as large a place 
as he can; but having found his place, let him 
neither repine if he fails to get quite what he wants 
nor rest in ignoble contentment because he has 
reached the object of his aspirations. 

But when this kind of gospel is preached the 
world at once asks, **Will you advise a man to be 
content with less than the highest professional suc- 
cess?" Certainly. The man who can only be 
happy when he is winning prizes has a radically 
wrong philosophy of life. The nation composed of 
such men is foredoomed to ruin. The man who 
plays only for prizes, whether of money or of office, 
is a destructive force in the community. The man 
who really does his duty as a citizen is he who seeks 
the opportunity to serve, and is ready to accept 
the measure of opportunity which his success in the 
competition gives him. 

This is one of the things about which the college 
knows more than the world, one where the college 
standards of success or failure are wiser and more 
Christian than the world's standards frequently 
have been. Let us take care that we do not forget 
or undervalue the lesson we have learned here ; and 
that in dealing with the larger problems of life we 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD 161 

value ourselves and our fellows for what they can 
do for the community, rather than for what they 
can do for themselves. Not the power to win 
prizes, but the power to take and fill the place 
awarded him by the competition, constitutes the 
measure and test of a man. 

This is the kind of measure that Christians of 
all ages have been taught to apply. This is the 
kind of self-renunciation of which their Master has 
given an example. This is the more excellent way 
which Paul points out to the disciples. He values 
professional success more than any of his fellow 
apostles and as much as anybody in the outside 
world ; but he rates the man higher than the work. 
The Christian community, as Paul looks at it, needs 
great preachers, and great lawyers, and great phy- 
sicians ; but far more than all these it needs Chris- 
tian gentlemen. Professional ambition counts for 
less than broad-minded charity, than public spirit, 
than a devotion, best when most unconscious, to 
ideals outside of ourselves — ^the kind of charity, 
the kind of spirit, the kind of devotion exemplified 
in the life of our Lord Jesus Christ. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class : The life of a 
strong man has two sides: the effort to find his 
place in society in keen competition with his fellow 



162 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

men ; and the whole-hearted acceptance of his place, 
when he has found it, as a trust to be nsed un- 
selfishly. In the aristocracies of the Old World 
exclusive stress was laid on the second of these 
elements. We were exhorted to be content to fill 
the station in life to which God had appointed us. 
In the American democracy the emphasis is all on 
the other side. We are told to find the best place 
we can. We are encouraged to compete until we 
sometimes forget that there is any end outside the 
competition, and lose sight of the unselfish purpose 
which must animate every professional man and 
every business man and every politician who would 
call himself either a gentleman or a Christian. 

You are going out to make your way in the 
world. You will do it like men ; and you will 
thereby prove your power to serve your fellows. 
May it be yours to find your happiness in that 
power and in that service ! 

He who wins the race for professional advance- 
ment is given the largest opportunities. But the 
lasting joy of life is not in the winning or the losing 
of the race. It is not, except incidentally, in the 
largeness or smallness of the opportunities given. 
It is in the completeness with which we meet our 
opportunities and are content to accept with un- 
troubled soul and tolerance of failure the chance 



THE CHRISTIAN STANDARD 163 

for giving such love and service as actually falls 
to our lot. May it be our fortune to render such 
service with a charity to all men that is not 
narrowed by professional prejudice; with a cour- 
tesy that is unruffled by success or by failure; 
with a hope and an endurance that are beyond the 
power of casual disappointment to touch. Thus 
shall each of us obey the injunction of the Master 
that each deny himself and take up his cross and 
follow him, and thus shall each of us find eternal 
life. 



THE PERSONALITY OF JESUS 

1916 

And I, if I be lifted up from the earth, will draw all men 
unto me. 

There are many different views regarding the 
personality of Jesus and the means by which he 
was able to do his work. There is but one view as 
to the significance of the work itself. No other man 
exercised so great an influence on the thought and 
feeling and action of the world. No other man gave 
so much spiritual help and comfort to those who 
needed it. 

I propose this morning to consider just what it 
was that Jesus tried to do for the ideals and morals 
of his time, and how far we have the opportunity 
to do the same thing for the ideals and morals of 
our time. 

The state of society in Palestine nineteen hun- 
dred years ago was not so different from our own 
as we are apt to think. People loved their families 
and attended to their business. Property rights 
were fairly secure; the law was tolerably well 
obeyed. There was^a good deal of complaint about 
the government, particularly the tax collecting 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 165 

agencies ; but in spite of bad government the com- 
munity was on the whole well ordered and pros- 
perous. 

The burden that rested heavily upon the people 
was the want of moral outlook, the dearth of ideals 
and ambitions. This was severely felt because the 
Jews had once had all these things in large meas- 
ure. They had dreamed of achieving spiritual 
leadership in the whole world under the guidance 
of a Messiah who should be king of all the nations. 
But as the realization of this dream was postponed, 
the stimulus which it gave to their thought and 
feeling gradually fell away. They became morally 
inert, if not morally dead. From time to time some 
one would rouse a portion of the people out of this 
inertia with the hope that he might be the Messiah ; 
but the ensuing revolution would result in failure 
which left things worse off than they were before. 
From time to time a scholar would strive to lead 
his fellow students back to the days when the life 
of the people had been better and more inspiring ; 
but the appeal of such a man was to the past rather 
than to the present or future, and it reached at the 
very best only a narrow circle of scholars like 
himself. 

Jesus took a different method to give people 
something to live for. The revolutionists had begun 



MiM 



166 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

by attempting to change material conditions, be- 
lieving that moral reform would come afterward, 
Jesus began with an appeal for a new and better 
kind of morality. Instead of simply trying to 
adhere to certain rules and observances, he taught 
them to pursue certain moral ideals. This is the 
whole burden of the Sermon on the Mount. The 
good that is obtained by keeping a rule that some- 
body else has set for you is a small and uninspiring 
thing. The man who would really live must be 
animated by the purpose for which the rule was 
instituted, and can thus be an active agent in 
morals rather than a passive follower of the system. 
This side of the teaching of Jesus won immediate 
acceptance and popularity; partly because people 
were tired of the morality of the Pharisees and glad 
to see it exposed in its true character, but still more 
because the new gospel met a real hunger for good 
which lies deep in the human soul. The man who 
goes before the people with ideals and can put them 
in plain words that may be easily understood is 
sure of a hearing and a following. 

But there were two other things which Jesus did 
at the same time that were not so popular. He 
insisted that these ideals should be pursued in an 
intelligent manner, and that his disciples should 
take the responsibility for doing their own duty, 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 167 

instead of spending their time compelling other 
people to do theirs. Many who had been attracted 
by the objects and purposes of his preaching were 
repelled by his method of getting at those objects. 
They were not content with a republic of God, 
where everybody should do the best he could in his 
own way ; they wanted a kingdom of God, in which 
they should be the chief advisers and in which per- 
sonal responsibility should be reduced to a mini- 
mum. They were ready to leave all and follow 
Jesus if he would lead them to a career of conquest ; 
but when he pointed out that a conquest of the kind 
they sought was impracticable, and directed their 
attention to the harder and more prosaic task of 
conquering their own appetites and passions, they 
left him. 

An experience of this sort comes to every re- 
former, in the twentieth century no less than in 
the first. He sees things that need to be done ; he 
shows the people the need, and fiLuds a ready re- 
sponse. They are prepared to hail him as a 
messiah who shall lead them into the promised land. 
They are zealous to support him in almost any 
means which he proposes for the forcible suppres- 
sion of wrong. If he points out the evils of drunk- 
enness, they will follow him in every attempt, wise 
or unwise, to enforce temperance by statute. If 



168 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

he shows them the disorganization of the family- 
life in America today, they clamor for a change in 
the divorce laws which shall mate people moral in 
spite of themselves. If he calls their attention to 
the prevalence of poverty amid advancing wealth, 
they ask him to abolish poverty by act of the legis- 
lature. If he preaches the gospel of peace and 
good will between nations, they at once dream of 
the establishment of courts of arbitration which 
shall render wars forever impossible. 

But the thinker sees some things that his fol- 
lowers do not see. He sees that something more 
than government machinery is required in order to 
make people temperate or moral, prosperous or 
peaceable. He sees that the result desired cannot 
be reached by organized force; that the social 
revolution of which his followers dream will do 
more harm than good ; that self-control, rather than 
public control, is the power on which we must rely 
for achieving the greatest results; that the slow 
influence of example, rather than the quick com- 
pulsion of law, is the means by which the real 
regeneration of society is achieved. 

What is he to do ? If he will suppress these con- 
victions the people will follow him; if he asserts 
them they will fall away from him. Under these 
circumstances the reformer is subject to a double 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 169 

temptation. If he is a man of action rather than 
of thought, he is likely to let some of his convictions 
go. He will think so much of his ideals that it 
seems more important to him to keep the leader- 
ship of a popular movement than to tell the truth 
plainly. He may sometimes allow himself to pur- 
sue measures which he knows to be wrong, in the 
hope of achieving a greater good in the end. He 
will more frequently lose his own sense of right and 
wrong, and end by becoming a blind leader of 
the blind. 

If, on the other hand, he is a man of thought 
rather than of action, he will tend to keep his prin- 
ciples but sacrifice his work. He will tell the truth 
to himself and to others, but he will lose faith in 
other men because they do not believe in him. He 
will cease to speak to the people, and will content 
himself with addressing the small minority that 
can understand his doubts and difficulties. He will 
become a philosopher rather than a reformer; a 
man who, in keeping his vision of the truth, has lost 
faith in his fellow men and the capacity for leader- 
ship that goes with such faith. 

Jesus was great enough to defy both these temp- 
tations. He never refused to tell the truth for 
fear of losing popular support. He never let 
the loss of popular support cloud his faith in man. 



170 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Show men something worth doing, show them the 
way to do it, take the lead in doing it yourself, and 
they will follow^; probably not today, perhaps not 
this year, possibly not this century, but sometime. 
That is the essence of the Christian faith; that is 
the historical truth that Jesus stood for. He did 
things that antagonized the people without losing 
his belief in the people. "When he told them to 
render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's 
they left him ; when he refused to fight the powers 
that were gathered against him at Jerusalem they 
turned against him. But even when his very dis- 
ciples abandoned him he stood calm in the belief 
in the triumph of his cause; and in spite of all 
drawbacks and vicissitudes the history of nineteen 
centuries has been proving that he was right. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: "We also, 
according to the measure of our several abilities, 
are starting out to do our work as reformers. 
Every man here is anxious that when his life is 
done those who follow him may be able to write on 
his tombstone that he left the world better for his 
having lived in it. We see great evils about us, 
against which we are anxious to lead our crusades. 
What is going to be the Christian method and the 
practical method of dealing with problems like 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 171 

those of intemperance or divorce, of avarice or 
of war? 

First, we must take home to ourselves the lesson 
of the Sermon on the Mount that virtues like 
temperance and morality, industry and peaceful- 
ness, have their chief source and support in men's 
hearts. They do not consist in abstinence from 
certain acts which can be prohibited by law, or per- 
formance of other acts which can be compelled by 
law. They mean self-restraint and self-devotion. If 
the restraint and the devotion are there, good laws 
and good government may help to prevent certain 
abuses ; but they can never be the starting point of 
morality or the measure of duty. 

Second, we must ourselves be prepared to set an 
example of this kind of restraint and devotion. 
We must not be content with the negative sort of 
virtue that simply avoids offences against the 
moral code of the community. "We should not 
regard ourselves as temperate when we simply ab- 
stain from excess in drink. We must face the 
harder task of avoiding excesses in word and 
thought and feeling. We should not regard our- 
selves as moral when we simply abstain from viola- 
tion of the marriage contract, or of commercial 
law, or of the rules for keeping the peace between 
men and nations. We must learn to think of mar- 



172 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

riage, not as a relation entered into by two people 
for their own pleasure, but as a partnership in the 
serious work of life, to be entered into with the 
same intelligence and the same devotion that we 
enter upon any other serious work. We must not 
regard our money as our own, to be used in any 
way that the law allows, but must stand ready to 
be at once more scrupulous in its acquisition and 
more generous in its use as we get farther away 
from the pressure of immediate need and have 
greater opportunities to decide for ourselves. We 
must not be deluded by false visions and theories 
of peace, but must set our hands to the work of 
lessening the actual danger of war, by understand- 
ing other people and other nations, avoiding boast- 
ful or self-complacent speech, and preparing to 
take our part in national defense if a fight is forced 
upon us. 

Third, we must make it clear to others that they 
have to take the same sort of personal responsi- 
bility. We must not yield to the fatal temptation 
of being flatterers of democracy. We must not cry 
' ' Peace, peace, ' ' when there is no peace. We must 
be ready to suffer abuse for our unwillingness to 
trust short cuts tq righteousness. We must be 
willing to forfeit consideration and influence and 
office which might be ours if we would sacrifice or 



PERSONALITY OF JESUS 173 

suppress our convictions. "We must remember that 
leadership is never worth having if it comes 
through sacrifice of intellectual straightforward- 
ness. 

Fourth, and perhaps hardest of all, we must 
believe in humanity when humanity deserts us. 
We must hold to our faith in the truth even when 
we are compelled to sacrifice our leadership because 
of the truth. That was Jesus Christ's supreme 
achievement. The man who can see through his 
failure to the success beyond, who can trust the 
slow force of character and example to do thiags 
that organized society has failed to do, who can 
fight for a cause that appears to be losing, or die 
for it if there is no chance to fight, drinks of the 
cup of which the Master drank and is baptized with 
the baptism with which he was baptized. 

When some one told Abraham Lincoln that he 
hoped God would be on his side, Lincoln answered, 
'*I am not so much concerned to try to have God 
on my side as to try to put myself on God's side." 
May this be our resolve today. May each of us 
try to place himself on God's side and stay there, 
through evil report and good report ; so that when 
we are called on for our last account every one of 
us may be able to say, * ^ I have fought a good fight, 
I have finished my course, I have kept the faith." 



174 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

Faith in man, or faith in the truth, or faith in 
God; they are but different names for the same 
thing. Whoso keeps one has kept all, and has 
secured the best thing that life has to offer. 



THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 

1911 
Fight the good fight of faith; lay hold on eternal life. 

Every one of us here assembled knows that a life 
which is worth anything is a life of fighting. I 
trust I may add that every one of us is glad to have 
it so. If we have made right use of our college 
training the call to arms is itself an inspiration. 
Each of us wishes to be in the heart of the contest 
and prove himself a man. 

The field of battle is as varied as life itself. To 
one man it is given to lead armies against desperate 
odds. To another the trumpet summons means a 
contest with overwhelming forces of ignorance and 
poverty. A third has the task of maintaining the 
truth as he sees it, single handed if need be, in the 
face of error and prejudice enthroned in high 
places. A fourth must fight to maintain his own 
manhood against the discouragements of poverty 
and sickness and disappointed hopes. 

How shall we do this? What must a man have 
in himself, in order to make a good fight against 
whatever odds he may chance to face ; in order to 



176 MOEAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

go out alone into the world, and keep his eyes level 
amid the vast movements that are around him? 
First and foremost, he must have steadfastness of 
purpose. This is the thing that makes a man of 
him. He need not have extraordinary ability to 
maintain the fight ; he need not have extraordinary 
physical courage ; but he must have the tenacity of 
will which is the foundation of character. 

I shall not try to analyze that strange ordering 
of God's universe by which a man of unbroken will 
can set himself up against the whole world and 
play life's game against it as an equal — yea, play 
it over and over again, no matter what has gone 
against him, so long as his resolution remains un- 
daunted. This was the kind of man pictured by 
Dante, with a sympathy and admiration which 
neither political nor theological enmity could chill, 
who, after leading forlorn hopes through all his 
life, rose from his fiery tomb to greet his enemy, 
with a face that ^ ' entertained great scorn of hell. ' ' 

Be he good or bad, the man who meets fate in 
this spirit challenges our admiration. The more 
desperate the fight of the man against his circum- 
stances, the more do we feel the glory of the asser- 
tion of his manhood. Our hearts beat faster as we 
hear the defiant chorus of the cholera-stricken 
officers in Ceylon: 



THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 177 

A cup to the dead already, 

And hurrah for the next that dies; 

or the yet more defiant cry, from the midst of Eng- 
land itself : 

Out of the night that covers me, 
Black as the pit from pole to pole, 
I thank whatever gods may be 
For my unconquerable soul. 

Why, then, if manhood is so much, do we look 
for anything else? Why do we not go out, each 
for himself, like some hero of old, to fight the giants 
and the monsters that come in our way ? For two 
reasons. First, because very few of us are strong 
enough to stand in our own unaided strength ; and 
second, because the few who thus make themselves 
independent of the support of their fellow men 
achieve a hopeless separation from what mankind 
has most cared for. Where did unconquerable will 
lead the Titans of the Greek drama, or the Satan 
of Milton's Paradise Lost? To an eternity of iso- 
lation — a hell which needed no artificial or external 
torments. ^' Which way I turn is hell; myself am 
hell.'' To the same isolation and the same end it 
has led men like Richard the Third, who have had 
the Titanic — or Satanic — strength to stand for 
themselves alone. 

But there are very few men who are strong 
enough to play their own game to the bitter end, in 



178 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

defiance of fate. Few of those who have striven to 
live their own lives without identifying themselves 
with some cause which will last after they are gone, 
have maintained their purpose unbroken through 
adversity. The man who believes in himself alone 
is usually putting his trust on a fragile support. 
Sure and permanent achievement belongs to him 
who lives for something outside of himself ; whether 
it be his friends or his country, his principles or 
his faith. Sometimes we meet a man like Napoleon 
whose abilities seem to make him an exception to 
this rule ; but sooner or later circumstances prove 
too much for him. Men have often wondered how 
it was that Napoleon, with his great military 
genius, failed when men like "William of Orange or 
Frederick of Prussia succeeded. It was because 
Napoleon, working for himself, played the games 
of war and politics like a gambler ; while Frederick 
and William, identifying their fortunes with those 
of their country, obtained stability of purpose and 
large vision of the meaning of success. Napoleon 
was a splendid commander as long as he won. 
Frederick and William showed themselves even 
greater in defeat than they did in victory. The 
heroes who have been able to assert their person- 
ality alone in the face of gods and men have been 
for the most part heroes of fiction rather than 



THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 179 

heroes of history. The more a man knows of life, 
the more he feels the need of having things outside 
of himself to live for. He needs friends ; he needs 
traditions; he needs ideals. These he must have, 
in order to give him stability of purpose and clear- 
ness of vision, to steady him in the hour of defeat, 
and to supply the hope of added strength for the 
contests that are yet to come. These he must have 
in order to make the end itself seem worth while. 
We ourselves know by experience the difference 
between working alone and working in the midst 
of other men who have the same interests as our- 
selves. A man who is alone stops in seasons of 
discouragement; and too often he finds it impos- 
sible ever again to resume his work with the old 
pace and the old enthusiasm. When a group are 
working together they carry one another over the 
dead points. They do not all lose heart at the same 
time. Each in turn gives and receives support. 
And this is not the whole difference. Ten men 
acting together are more than ten times as strong 
as the same individuals acting separately. Man, 
as Aristotle says, is by nature a political animal. 
Each man's zeal kindles the zeal of the others. A 
collective cause is stronger for the public senti- 
ment behind it. A regiment will carry a desperate 
assault through to its conclusion when each indi- 



180 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

vidual man of the regiment taken by himself would 
lose heart before he reached the goal. 

But while the a^ociation of men in groups of 
itself gives power and inspiration, it does not 
assure us that that power will be effectively applied 
or that inspiration be made to lead to anything 
worth while. A group of men needs principles and 
ideals just as much as an individual ; nay, perhaps 
more than the individual, because in the absence 
of great principles and ideals each member of the 
group is apt to mistake the approval of his fellows 
for a revelation of divine purposes. We must learn 
to feel, both as individuals and as communities, that 
we have a place in history ; that we stand in a long 
succession of men who have inherited principles 
and ideals from our fathers and who are to transmit 
to our children those principles and those ideals in 
greater fullness and strength. When we can really 
become possessed of the idea that we and those 
about us are part of a great movement of human 
life from age to age, then, and not till then, do we 
feel the best of inspirations — that which comes of 
working for all time. We must learn to get hold 
of the best traditions of the past and really work 
them into our lives, because by this means we can 
get hold of ideals for the future which will make 
life worth living. 



THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 181 

There are few things so important and few so 
little understood as the real use of traditions. 
Some people do not revere them at all; others 
revere them for their own sake and care for nothing 
besides. Your true man reveres them because they 
help to keep his ideals high and hold them erect in 
life's storms. The strongest tree is the one which 
drives its roots deepest into the ground. The taller 
the tree grows, the harder its roots must take hold 
on the soil. So it is with the life of a man. He 
that desires to reach forward farthest into the 
future which he would serve must also reach back 
hardest into the past from which he has sprung. 

All our great human institutions are attempts to 
realize this idea and to get men into these relations. 
The family has its associations and its traditions, 
which make a man stronger for having brothers 
and sisters and infinitely stronger for being one of 
a line whose good name he is anxious to maintain. 
What your father means to you and does for you 
is preparing you to mean the same thing and do 
the same thing for your children. The college 
makes you stronger in the same way, both by the 
friends you win and by the ideals you inherit. 
Tour profession will give you another set of asso- 
ciations, your country another and still wider one, 
helping to make your life larger and your purpose 



182 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

steadier. But there is one institution of which, on 
this closing Sunday of your college course, I want 
particularly to speak, and that is the institution 
of the Christian church. 

Nineteen hundred years ago there was a man in 
Judea who made friends in every rank in life, and 
who knew how to help those friends as never man 
helped them before, because he inspired them with 
his spirit. He came of a race whose religious tra- 
ditions were noble. He took all the nobleness which 
the past had given, but he broadened the ideals of 
those about him so that they might make a religion 
which was not for a race but for a world. Check- 
ered as has been the history of the church which 
he founded, it has yet in every age brought men 
together in wider bonds of sympathy than were 
ever dreamed of before, and has enabled those 
whose heart or purpose was weak to gain strength 
from their great leader and from those who have 
followed in his footsteps. The Christian brother- 
hood tries to realize for mankind what the family 
and the college and the country realize for their 
several groups. In Jesus the world found both a 
friend and a leader; and every follower of Jesus 
jSnds his strength in working with others and for 
others and in leading them as best he may through 
the devious paths of our life into a future which 



THE GOOD FIGHT OF FAITH 183 

shall be brighter than the present and a world 
made better for our having lived in it. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: You know 
well the kind of contest which is before you. You 
have already measured to some degree the forces 
against which you have to fight and the powers that 
you can use in the contest. You have learned that 
you have a little strength in yourselves. You have 
learned at the same time that you need much more 
than you have. You have learned to despise alike 
the braggart and the quitter — ^the man who thinks 
he can do everything and the man who thinks he 
can do nothing. You have learned to need your 
friends ; you have learned to stand by your friends. 
You go out into the world shoulder to shoulder 
with a group of associates whose help you will value 
more and more with each day of your lives. You 
have studied the history of God's universe in the 
books of science and the history of man's work in 
government and in morals. You should know 
better than all others how large are the ideals for 
which men ought to live. 'You have entered into 
a heritage of traditions of service which have grown 
up about this place through the life and death of 
honorable men who have unselfishly consecrated 
themselves to this institution; and you have lived 



184 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

during these years in Christian surroundings. You 
have lived among men in whom the spirit of help- 
fulness is strong; who hate the man who rises by- 
pushing another man down, and honor the one who 
leads all together toward the common goal. 

If we hold fast to the teaching here given, we 
shall help the world to hold fast to it. Men look 
to us to see what college education means; to see 
what science and history mean ; to see what Chris- 
tian tradition means. It ought to mean broad 
sympathy with men and help for all in working 
together. If we can make it mean this to ourselves 
and to others, we shall make America a Christian 
nation in the future in a higher and better sense 
than it ever has been in the past. 



SELF-CONSECRATION 
1917 

Blessed are they that have not seen, and yet have believed. 

The life of the conmninity demands the sacrifice of 
the individual life. This is the doctrine of the 
gospel; this is the teaching of history. A selfish 
nation is to all intents and purposes a dead nation. 
Athens, Rome, Byzantium, Florence, have in turn 
illustrated this truth. Outward splendor might 
hide from the public eye the decay that lay at the 
heart of things, but it could not abolish that decay 
or prevent its rapid progress. No amount of wis- 
dom or riches could avail for the protection of the 
city, if the children had lost the underlying habit, 
which characterized their fathers, of subordinating 
personal claims and interests to the needs of the 
commonwealth. Self-sacrifice is a political neces- 
sity, no less than a Christian precept. 

Among the lower animals the subordination of 
the individual to the needs of the community is 
secured by instinct. The bee or the ant is com- 
pelled by its very structure to incur labor and 
hardship that the community of bees or ants may 
prosper. The same spirit of instinctive self-sacri- 



186 MOEAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

fice is seen in primitive forms of human relation- 
ship like the family. The father will fight for his 
children and the mother will die for them, with no 
more thought of self and no more possibility of 
thinking of self than if reason had been withheld 
from their very being. What is true of the family 
is true to a certain extent of the political life of all 
primitive commonwealths. In the Indian tribe or 
the Highland clan, patriotism is an instinct just 
as much as filial affection is an instinct, and its 
dictates are equally unquestioned. But in more 
highly organized forms of society, like the modern 
city or the modern state, the result is not so simple 
or so sure. The workings of instinct give place to 
the less automatic and more uncertain workings of 
reason; unconscious habit gives place to conscious 
choice. The more complex a political unit becomes, 
the more must its members have some motive for 
the many disagreeable acts of self-sacrifice which 
the public necessity involves. 

Why does a man give himself pain for the benefit 
of those about him? Why should a rational being 
sacrifice his own pleasure for the advantage of 
others? The more people acquire the habit of 
thinking, the more insistent do these questions be- 
come, and the more important it is to have them 
answered rightly. 



SELF-CONSECRATION 187 

The lowest and most obvious motive for self- 
sacrifice is fear. This is the power on which un- 
civilized society relies for getting its disagreeable 
work done and compelling its members to sub- 
ordinate their welfare to the welfare of the body 
politic. The slave tills the ground for fear of the 
lash. Even the man who is nominally free con- 
forms to the customs of the tribe for fear of the 
chief who has power to kill him and of the evil 
spirits that can torment him or his fellows. For 
religion itself is to the savage little more than a 
complex system of magic rites to avoid the hatred 
of the demons by whom he is surrounded. 

A second motive, which marks a higher stage of 
civilization, is that of self-interest. As industry 
develops it becomes clear that the labor of slaves 
is ineffective labor, scant in quantity and bad in 
quality. The man who toils for hope of comfort 
rather than for fear of punishment does more work 
and better work than the serf or bondsman, and 
contributes more effectively to the resources of 
the community. This is why property displaced 
slavery ; this is why a social and moral and religious 
system based on fear has given place to a social and 
moral and religious system based on hope of re- 
ward. The gods of the civilized world are no longer 
demons who punish those that offend them; they 



188 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

have become friends and allies who love those that 
obey them, giving them prosperity in this world 
and happiness in the next. Religion is no longer 
a set of magic rites to propitiate evil spirits, but a 
set of creeds and ceremonials to secure the favor 
of good ones. 

But there is a third motive or group of motives, 
as much higher in character and better in influence 
than self-interest as self-interest is better than fear. 
We are so constituted that we want to imitate those 
whom we admire. Emulation of a noble deed, 
loyalty to a principle, devotion to a friend, conse- 
cration to a cause, take a man outside of himself 
and help him to do things which in his calmer 
moments he would have deemed impossible — things 
which fear could not have compelled or hope of 
reward incited. '' Heroes and Hero Worship'' is 
the title of one of Carlyle's best books; it is the 
starting-point of the best deeds that have been done 
in the life of the world. It is hard to find any one 
name by which we can characterize the underlying 
motives which lead to heroic acts of unselfishness. 
They have been grouped by Mr. Royce under the 
name of loyalty, and perhaps this is as good a word 
as any. By whatever name we call it, the spirit 
which leads us to aspire rather than to enjoy is 
the force which has made nations great and which 



SELF-CONSECRATION 189 

has made religion a vital thing. For the highest 
form of religion, like the highest form of patriot- 
ism, involves loyalty to things we do not fully 
understand — readiness to sacrifice the good we see 
and know for the sake of possibilities which we can 
understand but imperfectly. It was the glory of 
the gospel message that it was based not on fear and 
not on self-interest, but on self-consecration. 

Critics who see the small facts of history and 
overlook the large ones say that such a system is 
irrational. Fear is a motive which they under- 
stand; self-interest is a motive which they under- 
stand; but self-sacrifice appears to them unintel- 
ligible. They cannot conceive why a reasoning man 
should deliberately accept pain and hardship and 
death for the good of his fellow men or for the pro- 
motion of a cause which he apprehends imperfectly. 
They deny the possibility of really believing in 
things which a man cannot see. 

To these critics there is one all-sufficient answer ; 
and that is, that men do in fact sacrifice themselves 
to causes like these. Human nature is not so selfish 
as its critics think. Sympathy and loyalty and 
devotion make a stronger appeal than self-interest. 
''Come and suffer" is a cry which has never failed 
to find a response when the leader was prepared to 
set the example. An irrational response? Yes, 



190 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

gloriously and sublimely irrational; and the fact 
that human nature is ready to make that response 
is the thing which makes history worth recording 
and life worth living. Loyalty and the self- 
sacrifice that goes with it are not in the narrow 
sense rational, but they are lovable and victorious 
and take hold on eternal life. 

Do we love the man whose life is governed by 
fear and whose religion is an attempt to propitiate 
the powers of evil? We pity his cowardice and 
superstition. Do we love the man whose worldly 
acts are guided by self-interest and whose religion 
is an attempt to secure special privileges at the 
expense of his fellows? "We despise him or we 
hate him. We love the man who does things for 
others; who stands up to his principles in foul 
weather no less than in fair; who follows what he 
believes to be the truth, regardless of the conse- 
quences. It is the devoted man and not the suc- 
cessful man whom we make our hero. The Phari- 
sees had reason on their side; Jesus was by all 
selfish standards a martyr to unreason. But the 
man with suffering in his heart has turned to Jesus 
and not to the Pharisees for comfort ; the man who 
hoped that he had something to do in the world has 
turned to Jesus and not to the Pharisees for an 
example. Not personal success but personal sacri- 



SELF-CONSECRATION 191 

fice is the thing which commands admiration and 
influences the conduct of the strongest men in 
every age. 

And just because it rests on something more 
enduring than fear of punishment or hope of 
reward, a spirit of devotion is not only lovable but 
victorious. 

There is a story from the book of Daniel that 
makes my heart warm every time I read it. 
Nebuchadnezzar the king made a golden image and 
called upon all men to fall down and worship it. 
Three Jewish governors, Shadrach, Meshach, and 
Abednego, refused to do this. Nebuchadnezzar 
called them before him in his rage and fury, so runs 
the story, and threatened that, if they worshipped 
not, they should that same hour be cast into the 
midst of a burning fiery furnace ; '^ And who," said 
he, ''is that God that shall deliver you out of my 
hands?" Now mark the reply. Shadrach, Me- 
shach, and Abednego answered and said to the king, 
'^0 Nebuchadnezzar, we are not careful to answer 
thee in this matter. If it be so, our God whom we 
serve is able to deliver us from the burning fiery 
furnace, and he will deliver us out of thine hand, 
king. But if not, be it known unto thee, king, 
that we will not serve thy gods, nor worship the 
golden image which thou hast set up." That is the 



192 MOEAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

spirit that wins followers; that is the spirit that 
conquers the world. Had these men served their 
God on account of fear or for the sake of reward, 
the burning fiery furnace would have quenched 
their spirit as well as their life. It was because 
their faith rested on a surer foundation than selfish 
fear or selfish hope of reward that it became 
unconquerable. 

For reckless faith like this, and reckless self- 
sacrifice like this, take hold on eternal life. Great 
religion, as Royce has so well said, arises out of 
loyalty to lost causes. The blood of the martyrs is 
the seed of the church. There is something in the 
indomitable refusal to accept defeat which makes 
defeat impossible, so long as there remains a cause 
for which to fight. Here is where the religion of 
consecration has its advantage over the religion of 
self-interest or the religion of fear. The man who 
follows the demon whom he fears ceases to follow 
when the demon ceases to punish. The man who 
follows his God for the sake of the loaves and fishes 
loses heart when the reward fails. But the man 
whose soul is stirred and whose life is dominated 
by zeal for something outside of himself and his 
immediate environment — ^whether it be by sym- 
pathy for suffering humanity, or by the honor of a 
gentleman, or by faith in the truth as he sees it — 



SELF-CONSECRATION 193 

has not only something for which to live, but some- 
thing for which to die. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: Never was 
the call for sacrifice in behalf of an unselfish ideal 
more urgent and more universal than it is today. 
Those of us who go to the front are called to face 
hardship and death. Those of us who stay at home 
have to do double duty, for themselves and for 
those in the field. In a great war, none is exempt 
from the burden. To bring such a war to a success- 
ful conclusion, the commonwealth as a whole must 
be imbued not only with the spirit of patriotism but 
with the spirit of self-effacement. 

The nation against which we have been forced 
to take up arms has set a mighty example of what 
can be done where the people subordinate their own 
individual interests to that of the body politic. "We 
may well criticise the motives and the ideals by 
which the members of that nation are moved. Some 
are influenced by fear of an almost despotic author- 
ity above them; others, by a desire to exalt their 
own nation at the expense of all other nations in 
the world. They look for visible results to the 
neglect of invisible ones; they are more concerned 
to render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's 
than to render unto God the things that are God's. 



194 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

But whatever the motive, the self-sacrifice is there, 
and the unity and power that go with it are there. 
It is this national spirit, even more than technical 
efficiency or military skill, that has given Germany 
its strength. 

To cope with that spirit, we must evoke a similar 
spirit of self-sacrifice among our own people. If 
the loftier motives of love to our fellow men and 
loyalty to our sentiments of justice are to prevail 
over the motives of fear and self-aggrandizement, 
they must be made to call out the same kind of 
devotion and of self-forgetfulness on the part of the 
community as a whole. If we are to render real 
service in the cause of Humanism against German- 
ism, we must see to it first of all that our zeal for 
humanity makes us forget ourselves as fully as zeal 
for Germany has made the individual German 
forget himself in behalf of the cause for which he 
is engaged. 

A war for a great cause is an act of consecration. 
When the armies of mediaeval Switzerland knelt 
to receive the sacrament before going to battle, this 
was no empty symbol. If they had faith in the 
cause for which they fought they, like their Lord, 
were giving their bodies for the removal of the sins 
of the world. Like him, they were setting an 



SELF-CONSECRATION 195 

example of devotion through which came devotion 
on the part of others. 

It is not by arms alone that a war like ours is to 
be decided. The man who does duty at home has 
his share in the result, no less than he who goes to 
the front. The man who directs the labor or guides 
the policy of the nation has his share, no less than 
he whose hand produces food or munitions. Under 
conditions like these, all honest, intelligent, un- 
grudging work is public work; all training that 
enables us to do such work is preparation for public 
service. May each of us here today, whatever his 
powers and whatever his calling, begin his graduate 
life with a solemn act of consecration to a cause in 
which he believes. Thus, and thus only, shall we 
do our best service, to America, to the world, and 
to the unseen power that rules the world. 



THE COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 
1918 

This night thy soul shall be required of thee. 

Two years ago the question which the world asked 
every college graduate was, *'What have you done 
to prepare yourself for success in life ? Have you 
been taught how to make money? Have you 
learned how to get public office? Have you 
laid the foundations for professional distinction ? ' ' 
Different people had different ideas of what con- 
stituted success; but whatever their ideas were, 
they encouraged us to measure it by selfish stand- 
ards. They were incredulous when anyone said 
that the making of money was of little importance 
as compared with the right use of money; that 
public office was valuable only as a means of public 
service ; or that professional distinction was honor- 
able only in so far as it was accompanied by con- 
tributions to the actual well-being and progress of 
mankind. 

Today all this has changed. "We are no longer 
asked what we can do for ourselves, but what we 
can do for our nation and for the world. We call 



COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 197 

things by their right names. The man who tries to 
make money for himself without serving the nation 
is now called a profiteer. The man who gets the 
rank of captain when he does not deserve that of 
lieutenant is now called an impostor. Skill in 
securing personal recognition, by which we once 
measured success, is now seen to be a very unim- 
portant incident in the game of life. Not the 
advancement of the individual but the advance- 
ment of the nation — this is the goal which is now 
set before us; this is the demand which today is 
made on our college graduates. 

Amid all its evils, the war has brought a great 
spiritual awakening. We are awake to the fact that 
men have souls as well as bodies, and that their 
souls are the more important part ; that our spirit- 
ual life is not a disconnected thing, to be lived 
apart from others, but that we belong to a nation 
whose members have souls like our own and which 
has a national character and a national spirit of 
its own. Every people that has made itself a real 
place in history and has done enduring work has 
done so in virtue of that spirit. Athens, Rome, 
Florence, Cavalier England or Puritan England, 
Old France or Revolutionary France, each had its 
ideal and its soul. It is the story of these ideals 
that makes history worth reading; that distin- 



198 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

guishes these people from others equally prosper- 
ous in their time, which have perished from the 
earth and left their names unrecorded. 

We are today called to the leadership of a 
nation's spirit as thus awakened. The world will 
value our colleges according as they have fitted 
men for such leadership. What we have done in 
preparation for the army, the navy, the engineers, is 
good and wins recognition; but the all-important 
thing that the world craves is that we should know 
how to guide souls aright. 

What do we mean by the word soul? Not the 
mind as distinct from the body; not the emotions 
as distinct from the intellect; but the permanent 
part of a man's being, which, in the Scripture 
phrase, takes hold on eternal life, as distinct from 
transient changes of body and mind and emotions. 
The soul is by its very definition the immortal part 
of a man. What the nature of that immortality is 
we do not know. All our ideas of personality are 
so bound up with the forms of the present life that 
I suppose no two people have the same picture of 
what is to come hereafter. But whether they be- 
lieve in the continuance of a personality like that 
which we here enjoy, or picture themselves as 
joining 



COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 199 

the choir invisible 
Of those immortal dead who live again 
In lives made better by their presence, 

or are content to follow the example of the wisest 
of ancient Hebrews and say, '^Then shall the dust 
return to the earth as it was, and the spirit shall 
return unto God who gave it, ' ' — all agree in recog- 
nizing the inherent dualism of our nature; the 
perennial struggle of the instinct that aspires with 
the instinct that enjoys; the unconquerable inner 
self of Faust striving for something better than the 
world of Mephistopheles can produce. This reach- 
ing out for the future is known as idealism ; and it 
is the fundamental thing which gives a man the 
right to claim that he has a soul. 

Nothing is so contagious as this sort of idealism. 
We see this illustrated today, when people have 
roused themselves from the profits of business or 
pleasure, and in the course of one short year have 
become patriotic in deed as well as in word with a 
universal response which few of us ventured to 
expect. Yes, people are at heart idealists; they 
follow the man of intense ideals, and seek the leader 
who can give expression and direction to such 
ideals. Thus is created the soul of a nation. It is 
this patriotic spirit that gives a people its power, 
more than wealth or skill or political organization. 



200 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

It was because Germany thought that we had no 
national soul that she invited us to enter the ranks 
of her enemies. It is because she finds that we have 
a national soul that she now recognizes and deplores 
her mistake. 

Idealism is the fundamental characteristic of any 
soul worthy of the name, whether in a man or in 
a nation. But another quality must be added to 
make a strong soul; and that is endurance. Not 
endurance of physical hardship only, but endur- 
ance of alternations of fortune and of changes of 
external circumstances. Russia today gives us an 
object lesson of this need. There is, I suppose, in 
the whole world no more idealistic people than the 
Russians, and none more ready to bear physical 
pain for the sake of goals which they have set them- 
selves. What they could not bear was change of 
circumstance. They lost sense of direction and had 
no leaders that could set them right. They steered 
their course by the current and not by the stars; 
and, as happens to a man or to a nation when it 
loses its bearings, they soon ceased to steer and 
began to drift. We as a people are in no danger of 
repeating the mistake made by the Russians. We 
are not likely to lose^our bearings wholly. But we 
are likely, nay, we are certain, to meet alternations 
of hope and of discouragement, of success and 



COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 201 

of failure, which will try to the utmost our con- 
stancy of purpose and of faith. Here is the chance 
for leadership and the need for leadership. Ger- 
many, whatever her faults, has her ideals as a 
nation, and has shown the power to pursue them 
consistently in the face of adverse circumstances. 
If we are to win this war and prove the superiority 
of our ideals to hers, we must not only feel them 
with equal intensity but pursue them with more 
than equal constancy. 

Idealism gives us a soul. Idealism and endur- 
ance together give us a strong soul. But to give 
us a white soul, a soul whose immortality can be 
other than a misfortune, there is something else 
which is yet more essential. We must add the 
quality which on its intellectual side we call wis- 
dom, on its ethical side unselfishness — the quality 
which is shown in sympathy for the weak, in truth- 
fulness and courtesy to all men, and which has 
found its highest manifestation in the life of Jesus 
Christ. 

In Goethe's Faust Mephistopheles sought to 
destroy the human soul by teaching it to pursue 
pleasure of various kinds until it should become 
so absorbed in the moment that the future had no 
meaning for it. In Milton's Paradise Lost Satan 
seeks, not to destroy souls but to build up perverted 



202 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

souls; souls which shall hold ideals of the wrong 
kind and which, by the very strength and con- 
stancy of these ideals, shall be a menace to the order 
of the universe. Mephistopheles is the spirit of 
negation, which cares nothing for the good. Satan 
is the spirit of positive evil which exalts a standard 
of its own to displace the good, pursuing ideals of 
power to the exclusion and destruction of ideals of 
service. It is not with the ideals of Mephistopheles 
but with the ideals of Satan that we have to deal 
today. A great nation has become dazzled by a 
vision of power — a world order in which it shall 
be the strongest and shall mold the weaker to its 
pleasure. For the sake of this national ideal its 
members are ready to forget the personal interests 
of the moment, to submit to discipline, to endure 
hardship, to serve their leaders with unquestioning 
obedience, if only they in turn, individually and 
as a nation, may prove their superiority over 
others. 

Experience shows that they have chosen the 
wrong path. The ruthless pursuit of power, though 
it may make a man strong, leaves him with fewer 
associates as the years go on; while he who shows 
sympathy for the w^ak and courtesy to all men 
finds himself surrounded by friends who are con- 
stant in adversity as well as in prosperity. 



COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 203 

Treachery, though it may avail once or twice, in the 
end turns against the man who practices it. Real 
success is in the long run based upon truthfulness 
rather than deceit, the instinct of working with 
others instead of working against them. "What is 
true of men is true of nations. Each nation in 
turn — Austria, Spain, or France — as it has sought 
to conquer Europe by force has found itself faced 
by a union of powers against it who out of weakness 
became strong. Rome itself, which carried out its 
career of conquest more intelligently than modem 
European nations — for Rome, though it pushed its 
power remorselessly against its enemies, scrupu- 
lously kept its treaties with its friends — ^was in the 
very moment of its triumph consumed by civil 
strife among individuals who sought dominion for 
themselves ; and the world empire, built up by the 
generals and the publicists of five centuries, in 
three centuries found itself forced to recognize the 
superiority of the Galilean carpenter who had 
taught the world a truer lesson of what constituted 
real power than Rome herself could furnish. For 
love of our fellow men is not only true Christianity, 
but true wisdom. The Emperor Constantine told 
Eusebius that in the battle of the Milvian Way, by 
which the world's supremacy was decided, he saw 
in the heavens the cross of Christ, with the words 



204 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

^^In this shalt thou conquer." Whence the sight 
came we do not know; but he saw the truth, and 
sixteen centuries have borne witness to his clear- 
ness of vision. 

Gentlemen of the graduating class: We have 
been taught to believe in the Christian virtues of 
sympathy and courtesy and truthfulness. We have 
honored those who have tried to practice them and 
have despised those who made a boast of ignoring 
them. Now we find these ideals challenged. A 
great nation, which we have hitherto respected, 
claims the right to ignore such obligations in time 
of war, and to build up other standards of char- 
acter and achievement which must result to a con- 
siderable extent in suppressing them in times of 
peace. The very essence of Christianity, as we 
have understood it, is threatened, and threatened 
by a people whose discipline and endurance and 
technical intelligence make it a formidable an- 
tagonist. 

America has risen to the defense of these Chris- 
tian ideals. We have largely forgotten our com- 
mercial ambitions and political rivalries. We are 
prepared to squander our treasure and to sacrifice 
our lifeblood for the things that we have believed 
to be right. Our studies here in college, if they are 



COMPELLING POWER OF IDEALS 205 

worth anything at all, will help us to bring to the 
world the assurance of ultimate victory. To those 
who can take the larger view of events it is clear 
that treachery and terrorism and ruthless pursuit 
of power defeat their own ends ; and that the wis- 
dom to see this is of more importance to a nation 
than mere technical intelligence, however highly 
developed. 

We are going out into a world that is awake. 
It is imbued with a religious fervor such as it has 
not seen for generations past. It is ready to wel- 
come with pathetic eagerness those who, having 
weighed evidence, can defend their convictions as 
well as die for them. We have tried to prepare 
ourselves for positions of responsibility and leader- 
ship, either in the work of fighting or in the equally 
necessary work of organization. But whatever our 
line of work, and however great the responsibility 
that falls upon us, our largest task is to strengthen 
and guide aright the national soul which is coming 
into being ; for by the strength and the whiteness of 
its soul shall the nation be judged and its part in 
the conflict determined. Let us therefore, going 
out into the storm and stress of life, see above us, 
as did Constantine sixteen hundred years ago, the 
cross of Christ rising in the sky above the clouds 
of battle. Then can we truly say with the apostle. 



206 MORAL BASIS OF DEMOCRACY 

^^ Whether we live, we live unto the Lord; and 
whether we die, we die unto the Lord : whether we 
live therefore, or die, we are the Lord's." 



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